Morning Folks,

Due to an unfortunate mini-accident that has resulted in a torn ankle ligament, I am working from bed and a little woozy from pain meds. As such, I have not gotten a chance to formulate any useful deep thoughts ;) Instead, here’s a roundup of some excellent reads you shouldn’t miss:

• The Forces Reshaping What America Eats: This mini-report by Fitt Insider maps where American food is headed, and what makes it worthwhile is not just the list of trends, but the underlying sense that food is becoming more ideologically sorted. I particularly liked the part about ‘diet tribalism’, which aligns with everything I talked about in my Bridge2Food keynote: people are no longer simply choosing between healthier or less healthy options, but between whole cultural camps that signal identity, status, politics, and aspiration. The food fight is no longer just about ingredients or nutrition labels. It is about the social meaning of what we eat, and about how quickly food can become a marker of belonging or rejection. This is the bigger shift I keep thinking about: consumers aren’t just shopping for food, they are shopping for a worldview.

• Alt Proteins Fail to Take Off: This Rewild Life Substack piece argues that the alt protein slowdown should not be read as a simple technology failure. The more important story is the S-curve failure: the category never got from early adoption to broad mainstream use, which means the core issue was not whether the products were clever enough, but whether they ever became normal enough. Why does this matter? The author writes that it shifts the conversation away from “why didn’t the science work?” and toward “why didn’t the market, the message, and the use case scale?” The problem was not just product performance; it was category design, cultural fit, pricing, and trust. This is a useful framing to think about the sector’s stagnation: not as a dead-end innovation story, but as a failure to cross the much harder bridge from novelty to habit.

• The False Allure of Regenerative: In his Substack piece, Marc Gunter highlights how regenerative agriculture has been packaged into something much bigger than a farming framework. The movement has been unusually effective at recruiting celebrities, cultural icons, and high-profile storytellers to carry its message, giving it a sheen of legitimacy and momentum that often outpaces the evidence. That is part of the appeal, and part of the problem. Once a movement depends too heavily on iconography and emotional branding, it becomes vulnerable to scrutiny around the actual science, the actual outcomes, and the actual definitions behind the claims. Gunter questions how a movement can become culturally powerful even when parts of its intellectual foundation remain fuzzy, underscoring how easily food narratives can drift from evidence to mythology.

• Lunchables Created to Help Big Tobacco? Cigarette Research Study: The real provocation in this Fast Company piece is the historical continuity between Big Tobacco and Big Food. The argument is not just that food companies copied tobacco tactics; it’s that they learned how to engineer products for repeat consumption, hyper-palatability, and emotional dependence. Modern processed food was not an accident of convenience; it was shaped by a business logic that prized habit formation and high-margin repeat purchase. The uncomfortable twist for plant-based meat is that it often gets swept into the same narrative about ultra-processed foods, even though these products didn't originate with Big Food, resulting in a complicated communication problem for the category: it can be painted with the same brush as the worst excesses of Big Food, even when its origins and intentions are very different.

• Why Oatly’s Marketing Went From Wordy Billboards to Beverage Events: This interview with Oatly ’s EVP, Michael Lee, tells of a brand maturing out of its insurgent phase and into something closer to cultural infrastructure. In the beginning, Oatly had to explain itself loudly and weirdly because oat milk was still a curiosity; now the category is mainstream enough that the brand is trying to shape the surrounding beverage culture rather than just selling a single product. Lee talks about the strategic shift from product education to category curation: Oatly is no longer simply asking consumers to buy oat milk; it’s trying to define what modern drink culture looks like and where its product fits inside it. That’s a much more ambitious play, and it also reveals something important about brand power: once a product becomes familiar, the next battlefield is no longer awareness but taste, context, and cultural relevance. The other striking part is how deliberately Oatly is using real-world touchpoints, especially cafes, baristas, and events, to create a sense of movement around the brand, helping retailers, QSRs, and consumers see beverages through a newer, more trend-driven lens.

-Sonalie

 💰 Funding News

🏭 Finnish gas protein firm Solar Foods secured €77.8 million ($89.1 million) in grants and loan financing from Business Finland to construct its industrial-scale factory.
💡Factory 02, expected to begin operations in 2028, will be capable of churning out 12,800 tonnes of Solein annually at €4.30-5.20 per kg of protein.

🐶 British vegan pet food maker Omni raised £11 million ($14.5 million) Series A funding to expand its footprint, enter the US market and launch an Ozempic-style product for dogs.
💡The company has seen sales shoot up over the last year and has expanded its revenue 10-fold amid a wider boom in the low-carbon pet food sector in Europe. 

🇳🇱 Dutch precision fermentation startup Vivici secured €12.5 million ($14.4 million) from the European Innovation Council’s 2026 accelerator programme to scale up and expand its footprint for cow-free whey proteins.
💡The sustained appetite for high-protein products has sent the whey protein market into a frenzy, marking a major opportunity for Vivici.

 🤝🏼 Partnerships, Acquisitions & More

🥛 Danone has signed an agreement to buy Australia’s Made Group, maker of plant-based yoghurt brand Cocobella.
💡The deal marks its latest acquisition in the functional nutrition space and will expand its presence across Asia-Pacific and accelerate growth in “key health-focused categories”.

🍫 German manufacturing giant Döhler Group has acquired Nukoko, a UK startup producing cocoa-free chocolate from fava beans.
💡Döhler plans to work with customers to develop application-specific solutions using Nukoko’s chocolates, combining “great taste, supply chain resilience, formulation flexibility and commercial scalability”.

💉US-based Jellatech signed a deal with South Korea’s Hugel to develop and commercialise its cell-based human collagen for medical aesthetics and cosmetic products.
💡The global collagen market is valued at $12.7B, and is expected to grow annually by 11% until 2033; a sizeable opportunity for Jellatech.

☕️ Israel’s Coffeesai has partnered with Brevel to produce cell-cultured coffee using the latter’s illuminated fermentation technology.
💡The partnership is underpinned by funding from the Israeli Innovation Authority, which granted Brevel $1 million to expand its light-based fermentation technology platform for plant cell culture companies.

🧫 Australian cultivated meat leader Vow has named Alex Andrews as its new CEO, as the startup cuts jobs and eyes new verticals for its cell-culture technology.
💡Co-founder George Peppou is becoming an executive director and will lead a new stealth startup spun out of Vow to access markets beyond food.

🚀 Everything Else In Future Food

🇩🇰 In a project backed by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, scientists at the University of Copenhagen have extracted protein from rapeseed oil press cake, which could be used to make meat and dairy alternatives.

📈 South Korean food giant Pulmuone’s US subsidiary has recorded 17% year-on-year growth in tofu sales, outpacing the overall category to meet Americans’ appetite for minimally processed proteins.

🌱 An appeals court in Barcelona has overturned a first-instance ruling, clearing plant-based brand Heura of most unfair competition claims in a case initiated by the meat industry.

🥤 Danone has added yoghurts and shakes to its Silk Protein range of plant-based dairy products, building on America’s seemingly endless appetite for protein.

📊 A new study by Leaps by Bayer, Boston Consulting Group, and Ipsos UK outlines consumer attitudes towards breakthrough scientific technologies, including cultivated meat, whose potential is greatest among Gen Z.

💶 The EU stands to save €11.6 billion in budget, healthcare and environmental costs by shifting a majority of public food procurement spending towards plant-forward menus, according to a new study from Bryant Research commissioned by Proveg International.

🌱🍔  Future Food Quick Bites 

In our weekly column, Future Food Quick Bites, we round up the latest news and developments in the alternative protein and sustainable food industry. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers Kevin Bacon’s Beansday campaign, Devious Foods’s protein seasonings, and The Vegetarian Butcher Collective’s new CEO.

📆 Scene & Heard

🚀 Get involved with Bridge2Food Europe 2027

💡At Bridge2Food Europe 2026, Green Queen Media founder and editor-in-chief Sonalie Figueiras led two thought-provoking sessions exploring how politics, media, and
misinformation are reshaping consumer attitudes towards food. In her keynote, The Global Politicization of Food and the Influence on Consumer Choices, Sonalie examined how global narratives, cultural debates, and social media are influencing purchasing decisions and consumer trust. She also joined the panel Information Integrity and the Science of Consumer Trust, alongside experts from GFI, Behavior Global, and the University of Sussex, to discuss how the food industry can combat misinformation and strengthen science-based communication. Bridge2Food Europe 2026 welcomed 600+ attendees, 100+ speakers, and visitors from 30+ countries, bringing together organisations including Novonesis, Innova Market Insights, ADM, IFF, Nestlé Research, Oatly, and Euromonitor International. Bridge2Food Europe returns to Den Bosch, The Netherlands, 15 to 17 June 2027. Register your interest today.

🇸🇬 Asia-Pacific Agri-Food will unite hundreds of international stakeholders across the value chain to build agri-food agility and resilience in Asia-Pacific. It’s happening in Singapore 27th-29th October; secure your spot here.

🌏 The Growth Asia Summit returns on 8th-10th July 2026, after its biggest-ever edition in 2025, to once again explore the very latest market opportunities that have developed over the previous 12 months in the region driving the growth of the global food, beverage and nutrition industries. Find out more here.

🚜 Tesco, in partnership with Leading Edge Only, has opened applications for the 2026 Tesco Agri-tech Challenge, which invites agri-tech innovators from around the world to submit solutions that can help farmers and suppliers build more resilient, sustainable and productive food supply chains. Apply here by 3rd July.