Morning Folks,

A little bit of housekeeping: I will be off next week, so I will leave you (and this note) in the capable hands of our newsletter editor Nicola. The following week, Green Queen is taking our annual summer break, which means I will be back in your inboxes on July 30th! Happy hols!

Kantar just released its first-ever Sustainability Consumer-led Brand Ranking, and the takeaway is clear: the brands actually winning on sustainability aren’t the loudest—they’re the most seamless. Instead of leading with bold claims, they weave sustainability into products, experiences, and brand identities consumers already trust.

Drawing on insights from over 2,000 brands across 22 markets, the report highlights 12 traits shared by top performers, from making the sustainable choice feel effortless (and even desirable) to localizing messaging rather than pushing a one-size-fits-all global narrative. Perhaps most telling: what consumers care about in sustainable fashion doesn’t always match what the industry keeps talking about.

The report’s core point is that sustainability only moves brand equity when consumers experience it as part of the brand, not as a standalone claim. 

On food, Kantar’s sustainability work suggests the category is judged less by lofty ESG language and more by practical issues consumers can actually feel in their daily lives. For food and beverage brands, that means concerns like overconsumption, overpackaging, and waste tend to matter a lot in how consumers evaluate responsibility.

The broader Kantar sustainability material also includes food subcategories in its 2025 sector coverage, such as coffee, fast food/casual restaurants, flavoured beverages, bottled water, biscuits, snacks, milk and dairy, pasta/rice/noodles, ready meals, bread and bakery, and pet food. One useful clue from Kantar’s older consumer research is that, in food, retailers and producers are expected to act on overconsumption and overpackaging because these are visible, relatable pain points for shoppers.

So the food takeaway is basically this: consumers are not looking for abstract sustainability theatre; they want brands to reduce waste, packaging, and excess in ways that feel tangible and credible.

Alt protein brands can learn that sustainability alone is rarely the main purchase trigger; it works better when it’s embedded in a product that already feels tasty, healthy, familiar, and easy to choose. Kantar’s broader message maps well onto this: don’t make sustainability the hero line, make it part of a better everyday food experience.A few practical lessons stand out:

• Lead with benefits, not just impact: taste, protein content, health, and convenience are stronger hooks than abstract climate messaging.

• Localize the story: avoid one global sustainability narrative and adapt messaging to each market and occasion.

• Reduce friction: make the better choice the easier choice through format, packaging, shelf presence, and price architecture.

• Build familiarity: use recognizable ingredients, clear front-of-pack cues, and product formats people already understand.

• Match the consumer’s real concern: if the category is food, the fastest trust builders are usually taste, health, and practical value rather than virtue signaling.

TL; DR: Alt protein brands win when they stop selling a cause and start selling a great food product that happens to be better for the planet.

-Sonalie

💡 Only on Green Queen

🚀 Exclusive: Lever Foundation Expands Plant-Based Policy Work to India & Thailand
The sustainability non-profit Lever Foundation is expanding its policy initiative to increase plant-based food availability in restaurants, hotels, and retailers in India and Thailand.

 ✅ Must-Read Headlines

💶 Dutch cultivated meat pioneer Mosa Meat received an €875,000 ($1 million) loan from state-owned Invest International to navigate regulatory processes and launch into countries across the globe.
💡The firm, which is one of the best-funded in the space, has indicated that it expects approval in the UK first, although that was before the UK moved to realign with the EU’s single market rules.

💵 Nutrition From Water (NXW) has made an equity investment in Portugal’s PhycoFerm, formalising a joint R&D collaboration to accelerate microalgae strain generation.
💡The investment will enable NXW to identify variants with enhanced productivity, robustness, and targeted metabolic traits.

💊 Danish biotech giant Novonesis has signed an exclusive deal to scale up and commercialise TurtleTree’s precision-fermented lactoferrin protein, after making an investment in the Singaporean startup.
💡Novonesis will target the early-life nutrition market through its scale-up efforts, while also securing selected commercial rights for dietary supplements.

🇩🇪 German engineering company GEA is relocating its Application and Technology Center for future food from Hildesheim to Sarstedt with a €4 million ($4.6 million) investment.
💡The move places GEA’s alternative protein and biotech activities directly alongside established engineering and process capabilities, meaning customers can draw on the same GEA teams from early pilot trials through to full industrial plant design. 

🧫 French cultivated meat leader Parima has demonstrated tonne-scale production of its duck at viable cost economics on a 22,000-litre line run by Australia’s Vow, which is the largest food-grade cell culture bioreactor globally.
💡Parima achieved the breakthrough at a 99% lower cost than earlier runs, driven by successive gains in cell culture yields and the volume efficiencies of operating at scale, removing the “final barrier” to scaling up cultivated meat.

🆕 The Better Meat Co, known for its Rhiza mycoprotein, has changed its name to BMC Ingredients as it expands its ingredient portfolio beyond meat alternatives.
💡The firm is now leaning into the booming longevity market by highlighting the presence of compounds like ergothioneine and spermidine in Rhiza.

 💰 Government Action & Policy

🇯🇵 Japan’s government has laid out a draft public-private investment roadmap across 17 sectors for 2040, totalling $2.3 trillion, including targeting $6.2 billion in funding for novel food technologies.
💡The country wants to become the most advanced bioeconomy society by 2030, and will initially target consumers in Europe and the US before expanding into Asia.

🇳🇱 Future food businesses in the Netherlands are calling on the government to make at least €200 million available via an EU funding mechanism to expand alternative protein production.
💡By leveraging this mechanism, the open letter states that the Netherlands could unlock a further €400M in private investment for alternative proteins.

🗺️ The EU has published its long-awaited Protein Plan, acknowledging the importance of plant-based proteins but failing to set concrete targets to increase production for human use.
💡The plan primarily focuses on reducing the bloc’s dependency on imported plant-based proteins.

🇪🇺 In its first policy brief, Horizon Europe-backed project Giant Leaps is urging the EU to accelerate the transition to alternative proteins while preserving the nutritional adequacy of diets.
💡The brief notes how the protein transition is progressing slowly as individuals and businesses face challenges in making this change.

🫘 A coalition of over 100 food, farming and nutrition experts is calling on the USDA to expand access to pulse-based ingredients to help schools meet its new protein-rich dietary guidelines.
💡The coalitiion advises that by embedding more beans, chickpeas, dried peas, and lentils into the children’s nutrition system, schools will be able to more easily meet dietary recommendations at an economical cost.

 🤝🏼 Mergers & Acquisitions

🐟 Bayou Best Foods, based in the US, has taken over Germany’s BettaF!sh to bring its shrimp, tuna and salmon alternatives to more consumers.

🌱 US holding company Livekindly Collective has signed its latest acquisition deal with the purchase of German plant-based foods startup Greenforce.

🇪🇸 Spanish manufacturer Alimentos Sanygran has acquired the plant-based and organic business assets of Nutrition & Santé’s Iberia arm, including a factory and 60-odd employees.

📊 Germany’s Planethic Group (formerly Veganz Group) has kickstarted self-administration proceedings to secure its “long-term competitiveness”, a year after restructuring the business.

🚀 Everything Else In Future Food

🧁 Nambawan Spain, a spinoff of Nomad Bioscience, unveiled Thaûma, a thaumatin sweetener produced via plant molecular farming, which is 13,600 times sweeter than sugar.

🍕 Californian precision fermentation startup New Culture has secured another patent for its recombinant casein protein, covering its flagship mozzarella product in the US.

🍔 Spanish plant-based leader Heura has debuted its first non-meat-mimicking products: legume-based veggie burgers that contain twice the protein of the category average.

🌱🥩 Quorn’s foodservice arm has supplied its mycoprotein to William White Meats for the launch of UltiMeat, a lineup of blended meat products for UK restaurants, caterers, and retailers.

⭐️ The Michelin Guide is retiring the Green Star by the end of 2026, six years after it first introduced the sustainability accolade, which was criticised by some as a greenwashing enabler.

🇺🇸 The US’s much-criticised update to the dietary guidelines will likely worsen the food system’s environmental impact by up to 33%, thanks to the spotlight on protein and red meat, according to a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

🌱🍔  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 Oatly’s partnership with Dutch Railways, Finless Foods’ crowdfunding round, and Gosh!’s Mad About Veg campaign.

📆 Scene & Heard

🇸🇬 The Asia-Pacific Agri-Food Innovation Summit 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.

🤖 Coefficient Giving is launching a $10-30 million RFP for work to help ensure AI improves human health and wellbeing, with particular attention to risks for and benefits to the global poor. Find out more and apply here.

🇪🇺 Food Ingredients Europe, taking place 17th-19th November, will bring together over 24,500 attendees and 1,500+ exhibitors from more than 135 countries to showcase industry advancements, network, and discover emerging trends. Sign up here.

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