Morning folks,

This week, I’m sharing a few off-the-cuff observations from our latest reporting, all of which are featured below (keep scrolling!). These are not necessarily fully-formed thoughts, so thanks for humoring me.

• With approvals in the US and APAC, as well as a supportive UK, it appears the EU is now feeling left behind on the regulatory front. I see parallels with the bloc’s approach to AI. Europe is facing an identity crisis: lean in to strong and trusted regulation and potentially lose out on building a competitive home market for innovators, or lower standards and risk unintended health and public safety consequences?

• The alternative coffee space continues to attract new founders with another startup emerging from stealth. How many is too many, I wonder? And what are the routes to potential exits? For alternative chocolate companies, getting acquired by a big confectioner makes sense. For bean-free coffee, I’m wondering if these could potentially be B2B ingredient plays, where maybe a Givaudan buys the IP?

• Latin America’s alternative protein ecosystem is getting more active. But is it enough? Even with strong government support, the alt protein scene in Asia has slowed down substantially, and LatAm doesn’t have much of that. Is it a region that will continue to produce unicorn types like NotCo that can build a US or global presence? Or is there potential to build a homegrown moat?

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• Synbio food tech startups are ramping up collaborations, as the B2B route becomes the most viable from a revenue point of view. I wonder: if startups had built-in offtake agreements with larger companies pre-agreed when going out for funding, whether this could help attract more investors back to the space?

 -Sonalie

💡 Green Queen Exclusives

💰 5 Minutes With A Future Food VC: Oyster Bay Venture Capital’s Felix Leonhardt
In our new interview series, we quiz future food investors about the solutions that excite them the most, their favourite climate-forward restaurant, and what they look for in successful founders. Here, Felix Leonhardt, Managing Partner at Oyster Bay Venture Capital, shares how the industry has changed since he launched his startup in 2012, and what that means.

✅ Must-Read Headlines

🇪🇺 In a potentially big win for cultivated meat and precision fermentation, the EU is set to publish a document outlining its push to overhaul and fast-track novel food approval.
💡The EU’s regulatory framework for novel foods is amongst the world’s most rigorous, with the complexity and timelines driving many homegrown companies to look to other markets first - this could spark a massive change.

🇧🇷 São Paulo-based precision fermentation startup Future Cow secured R$4.85 million ($885,000) in equity and public funding to expand its platform for animal-free dairy proteins.
💡Future Cow is working on producing both casein and whey (including the iron-regulation bovine lactoferrin protein), enabling it to reach a wider consumer base for a range of applications.

☕️ Belgian startup Koppie, which makes a single-ingredient coffee alternative using local legumes, emerged from stealth with a pre-seed funding round.
💡The capital injection adds to the €400,000 it has secured in grants from the Flemish Institute of Innovation & Entrepreneurship.

🇦🇺 University of Queensland researchers have produced precision-fermented dairy proteins that will now be scaled up by Sydney startup All G.
💡This marks the first commercial technology transfer for government-backed FaBA’s Innovative Ingredients Program, which supports the development of next-gen food ingredients.

🇩🇪 Germany’s Veganz Group has established a new subsidiary, Mililk FoodTech, and will sell its OrbiFarm subsidiary for €30 million.
💡The strategic moves are designed to ‘unlock hidden business value’ following a 34% drop in sales last year.

💵 Two months after declaring bankruptcy, Atlantic Natural Foods, the company behind Loma Linda and Tuno, has signed an asset purchase agreement with Philippines-based Century Pacific Food.
💡Atlantic Natural Foods had faced pressure from government tariffs, inflation, and more. This deal will allow it to continue operating after an extended period of uncertainty.

🆕 New AI-Powered Tech

👯‍♀️ French startup Gourmey has partnered with DeepLife, an AI-led cellular digital twin tech company, to develop the world’s first avian digital twin.
💡Gourmey is awaiting regulatory approval for cultivated meat in six markets; could this partnership solve the cultivated meat industry’s biggest pain point - pricing - and give it commercial advantage? 

🧪 Paris-headquartered Smey launched the Neobank of Yeasts, a digital databank of yeast fatty acid profiles designed to speed up the development of next-gen oils for food and beauty products. 
💡The tool replaces genetic engineering with a “precision-matching process” that cuts R&D timelines from two years down to 30 days.

🇬🇧 UK firm Multus Biotechnology unveiled an animal-free media formulation for cultivated meat, allowing companies to eliminate fetal bovine serum from their products.
💡Multus used AI and automation to speed up its media development, creating machine learning models and integrating them with high-throughput lab automation systems.

📚 Key Research

💸 Research by Stop Financing Factory Farming reveals that, while the world’s leading finance institutions significantly divested from industrial animal agriculture last year, factory farming still received five times more funding than sustainable systems.

📈 A new survey by Ipsos Observer UK reveals that, while young men are driving the rise in meat consumption in the UK, they’re also more open to cultivated meat than other demographics.

♻️ Researchers from China’s Jiangnan University surveyed over 1,024 residents in Shanghai to analyse the impact of social media use, materialism, obsessive-compulsive buying, and impulsive buying on food waste. Here’s what they found.

🌱 A new review suggests that well-planned plant-based diets are safe and healthy for kids, if they’re carefully planned and supplemented to prevent nutrient deficiencies.

🚀 Everything Else In Future Food

🍪 Japan’s largest retailer, Aeon, launched a private-label biscuit SKU featuring ChoViva, a cocoa-free chocolate alternative by Planet A Foods, marking the startup’s Asian debut.

🇮🇳 Mumbai-based Prot debuted Prot Block, a shelf-stable ingredient offering health-conscious Indians a new format of plant-based protein.

🌱🍔  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 Chike Nutrition’s plant protein coffees, a sunflower seed meat alternative, and US physicians’ letter to the government.

📆 Scene & Heard

Check out the packed programme at Food Frontier’s AltProteins 25

🇦🇺 Food Frontier’s AltProteins 25 isn’t just focused on what’s next in food — it’s focused on what’s necessary. This year’s program reflects a new level of ambition and refinement, bringing together bold thinkers and doers who aren’t afraid to ask hard questions and pursue transformative answers. Get your ticket to join the event on 14th October.

🤩 The seventh-annual Reducetarian Summit will take place 24th-26th October, and will feature 100+ speakers and a full expo showcasing delicious plant-based food. Find out more here.

🇹🇭 Fi Asia Thailand is Asia's premier international event for food ingredients, and will bring local and global tastemakers together at one dedicated show on 17th-19th September. Register here.

🇺🇸 Immerse yourself in ground-breaking research and collaborate with those driven by a passion to impact the future of food at the IFT FIRST Annual Event and Expo, happening 13th-16th July. Learn more here.