Israel’s Aleph Farms, a pioneer of cultivated meat, has lowered its valuation by 73% in its upcoming funding round, but the firm says adapting to “changing market conditions” is necessary.
As food tech companies feel the pinch, Israeli cultivated beef producer Aleph Farms has been forced to slash its valuation as part of an “emergency fundraising” round, according to tech publication Calcalist.
The company has reportedly been aiming to secure $25M from investors “to stay afloat”, but is so far expected to raise only $10M in the coming weeks, based on reports from shareholder Millennium Food-Tech.
As per Calcalist, this new round would be based on a valuation of $80-100M, representing a 73% drop from the $300M valuation in its Series B funding round in 2021. Millennium Food-Tech itself slashed the value of its stock in the company by 75%, suggesting that Aleph Farms “does not have sufficient cash reserves to continue its operations in the coming year”.
“Aleph Farms is in the final stages of closing the first round of a fundraising cycle that began in 2024, adding to the bridge investment secured in 2023 – a testament to the company’s resilience and the confidence of its investors,” the company said in a statement sent to Green Queen.
“This funding will strengthen financial stability, extend cash reserves, and enable the launch of the world’s first cultivated beef steak in restaurants, in collaboration with Chef Eyal Shani.
“Like all companies in our industry, Aleph Farms is adjusting its valuation to reflect market conditions in 2024-25, proactively aligning with broader market trends. We view [this] as a natural and healthy adjustment following the enthusiasm of 2020-21.”
‘Our situation isn’t unique’
Graphic by Green Queen
Since it was established in 2017, Aleph Farms has raised over $118M from investors. This included the $105M Series B round in 2021 (with Leonardo DiCaprio joining as an investor), reflective of the mid-pandemic venture capital boom in alternative protein.
But inflation – a result of both Covid-19 and the ensuing wars in Gaza and Ukraine – and misinformation campaigns from the meat lobby have scuppered the momentum since. In 2021, cultivated meat startups raised $1.3B globally. Last year, however, they secured just over a tenth of that, raising $137M (and only $6M in the second half), according to Net Zero Insights data obtained by the Good Food Institute.
“Like any organisation, and especially one developing innovative and groundbreaking technology from Israel, we are also affected by market conditions and the geopolitical situation. We must adapt to the global economy while focusing on leaner budget management,” the company said.
A spokesperson for Aleph Farms told Green Queen: “I don’t believe our situation is unique – companies in our field must demonstrate a clear path to short-term profitability, alongside low-cost production, and strong customer demand.”
They added: “As we anticipated a few years ago, consolidation is inevitable and represents a natural evolution for an industry like ours. Those who can adapt to changing market conditions will be the ones who thrive in the long term.”
Aleph Farms tightens focus with three-pronged strategy
Courtesy: Aleph Farms
In the last year, Aleph Farms has been looking to expand its operations globally, after receiving the go-ahead to sell its cultivated beef steak in Israel in December 2023. That was contingent on the company clearing a Good Manufacturing Practices inspection for its production facility, on which there has been no public update yet.
The startup, which has previously outlined its aim to reach $1B in revenue by 2030, is currently awaiting regulatory approval in Singapore, the UK, Switzerland, and Thailand, and has also been in “advanced pre-submission consultations” in countries including the US. It has plans to eventually expand into Japan, South Korea, Australia, China, and Hong Kong too.
In 2022, it opened a 65,000 sq ft plant in Rehovot, Israel, allowing it to initially produce 10 tonnes of cultivated steak annually, before acquiring another manufacturing facility in Modi’in and signing co-manufacturing deals with ESCO Aster in Singapore and biotech firms in Thailand.
However, it is now focusing on three strategic priorities: optimising production and reducing costs, commercialising its first product and demonstrating market demand, and achieving profitability. “These goals now take precedence over the aggressive expansion of production capacity, which was a central part of our plan in 2021,” the company said.
Courtesy: Aleph Farms
“In recent months, Aleph Farms has achieved significant breakthroughs, including a 97% reduction in production costs compared to 2022, signing commercial agreements with leading global food corporations, and demonstrating market demand through collaborations with chefs in four countries,” it added.
“Additionally, following regulatory approval from the Israeli Ministry of Health, we are preparing to launch our product in Israel, leveraging an improved production platform and building our brand in collaboration with key industry players.
“Aleph Farms continues to lead the field of cellular agriculture worldwide, driving meaningful change in food systems – towards a safer, more sustainable, and resilient future.”
How do regional differences and economic disparities affect interest in cultivated meat in the world’s largest beef exporter?
Brazil is the world’s largest beef exporter, second-largest meat producer, and third-largest consumer of beef per capita. But with the food system making up nearly three-quarters of its GHG emissions, a protein transition is crucial in the country.
Home to meat giants like JBS, Minerva and Marfrig, several of these companies have joined startups like Fazenda Futuro (Future Farm), The New, and Vegabom in offering alternative proteins to Brazilians.
In fact, retail sales of meat and seafood analogues increased by 38% in 2023, reaching $226M. And a third of Brazilians are either flexitarian, pescetarian, or meat-free.
Courtesy: Quorn
Does the growing interest in plant proteins extend to technologies like cultivated meat? It’s a question explored by researchers at the Federal University of Paraná, who examined how regional disparities impact attitudes towards such novel foods in a study published in the PLOS One journal this month.
“As agriculture and animal production constitute a major component of the country’s GDP, the introduction of meat alternatives nationally, e.g. cultivated meat, seems essential to maintain its market share in the future, requiring careful planning to maximise the benefits and mitigate the disadvantages,” wrote the authors.
Health awareness gap a major barrier for cultivated meat
The 800-person study focused on two vastly different Brazilian cities, São Paulo and Salvador. The former is the most populous and economically developed area in the country, while the latter is ranked with the weakest economic and employment indicators among Brazilian state capitals.
Nearly two in five (38%) of respondents had heard of cultivated meat, with familiarity higher in São Paulo (45%) than in Salvador (32%).
This trend extended to consumption too. A third of survey participants said they’d eat cultivated meat, while 41% were unsure. In São Paulo, 41% were interested in trying these proteins, versus 24% in Salvador.
Among those who showed a willingness to eat cultivated meat, nearly a third said they were simply curious about it, a quarter cited animal welfare, and one in 10 said they were motivated by health reasons.
On the other hand, 26% indicated they wouldn’t consume these foods, with neophobia – a fear of the new – the strongest detractor. These respondents also cited “artificiality”, a lack of knowledge about the product and the process, and health impacts as factors holding them back.
Courtesy: PLOS One
Aligning with this, the study found that interest in consumption increases with knowledge. Half of those who had heard of cultivated meat wanted to try it, and 29% were uncertain. But among those unfamiliar with it, only 22% said they’d eat it, and nearly half (49%) were unsure.
While a majority of those aware of cultivated meat believe it’s better for the animals and the planet, only a third say the same about human health, highlighting the knowledge gap about the health implications of these proteins. This worsens among people who haven’t heard of these products – only 15% of them see benefits for human health, while 23% believe they’re harmful, and a third say they don’t know.
Regional and cultural context key for marketing and policies
The study showed that men (37%) are more interested in eating cultivated meat than women (30%), and these foods are more popular among Gen Z (39%)and millennials (32%) than those aged 50 and above (22%). Meanwhile, interest in cultivated meat remains similar across education and income levels, though higher-earners are more likely to eat cultivated meat.
However, there’s a significant disparity between people who eat meat frequently and those who don’t, with folks who eat meat more often more likely to be interested in trying cultivated meat. Only 9% of non-meat-eaters want to try cultivated meat, but this rises to 29% for people who eat meat up to three times a week, and 38% for those who consume meat four to seven times a week.
Respondents associated cultivated meat more positively with the environment than they did conventional animal proteins, even those who hadn’t previously heard of cultivated proteins. This is an important finding, considering that meat makes up the majority of Brazil’s agrifood emissions. Beef alone is responsible for 78% of this footprint.
Courtesy: Getty Images/Billion Photos
The researchers highlighted the importance of regional considerations for cultivated meat stakeholders. They noted that São Paulo has a more diversified economy and greater access to technologies and innovation. Combined with higher purchasing power and greater climate awareness, its residents are more likely to be informed and accepting of cultivated meat.
“In contrast, citizens of Salvador, facing economic challenges such as a higher unemployment rate and lower purchasing power, may encounter barriers to accessing information about these new products, which could result in a lower intention to consume,” the study stated.
The researchers argued that public policies can be made more efficient through targeted educational initiatives that address the specific concerns of different regions, and industry stakeholders should adapt their marketing to be more culturally sensitive. “In addition, collaborating with local institutions is likely to foster a more productive approach to introducing cultivated meat,” they added.
The study comes just as Brazilians cut back on beef. According to the Good Food Institute, 36% of consumer have reduced their red meat intake between 2023 and 2024, mainly due to health detriments and high costs. It also chimes with a 2021 study, which found that 66% of Brazilians are interested in trying cultivated meat.
Synbio must prove itself as a superior alternative and win consumer trust to succeed amid the battle against ultra-processed foods, writes our columnist Chiara Cecchini.
By Chiara Cecchini
Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are under fire, and as policymakers crack down, synthetic biology (synbio) foods risk being caught in the crossfire. In the rush to overhaul the American food system, are we discarding innovation along with industrial excess? As regulatory scrutiny tightens around artificial ingredients and processing techniques, synbio faces an urgent challenge.
The reality is sad: over half of Americans’ caloric intake comes from UPFs, a cultural problem that cannot be ignored. The rise of UPFs was not accidental – it was an industrial response to feeding an ever-growing global population. UPFs enabled human expansion to over 8 billion people, a scale unimaginable even just 100 years ago. But this came at a global health cost. The challenge now is not just to reject UPFs but to find better alternatives that ensure precision, scalability, consistency, and efficiency – without sacrificing human health and planetary stability.
The ultra-processed villain narrative
The war on UPFs is intensifying. Major media outlets, including the Guardian and the Times, have reinforced the growing consensus that UPFs fuel chronic disease. Policymakers are responding aggressively.
California Governor Gavin Newsom’s executive order calls for measures to restrict UPF purchases, possibly requiring warning labels. This move could set a national precedent, broadening regulatory scrutiny beyond junk food to include all processed foods – including synbio innovations.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, now confirmed as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has made UPFs a central battleground. He has framed them as a root cause of modern health crises and is pushing for stricter controls, including labelling and ingredient bans. If his vision shapes future food policy, synbio companies have the opportunity to prove their products belong in a different category – one that delivers both undeniable health and sustainability benefits.
Courtesy: Beyond Meat/Green Queen
So, is synbio all ultra-processed food?
One of the biggest risks to synbio’s future is its classification. As the crackdown on ultra-processed foods intensifies, many are questioning whether synbio belongs in the same category. While synbio foods undergo industrial processing, they do not necessarily share the problematic characteristics of traditional UPFs – namely, reliance on artificial additives, refined sugars, and hyper-palatable formulations designed for overconsumption. Instead, synbio represents a number of production approaches that enable the precise engineering of food ingredients, making it very distinct from traditional ultra-processing.
It is fundamental that the industry actively defines its position before regulators do. If synbio is perceived as just another form of processed food, it risks being caught in the sweeping regulatory backlash against UPFs. However, by prioritizing rigorous nutritional research, transparency, and clear communication, synbio can establish itself as a separate category – one focused on health, precision, and sustainability rather than industrialised over-processing. This also represents an opportunity for leaders in the space to leave the sustainability cocoon and address the real question: how do synbio ingredients impact human health at scale?
The stress of broadening the message beyond sustainability is an important one. Besides clear positioning against UPF, sustainability alone doesn’t sell. The consumer reality is clear: taste, price and health drive food choices. Without a compelling safety and health-centric value proposition, synbio risks being dismissed as just another form of industrialised food.
Preserving small, hyperlocal, diverse food systems is essential, and feeding a global population of 8 billion requires also scalable, climate-efficient solutions. Synbio now has the opportunity to provide that global reach, jointly with safety, nutritional value, and a distinct advantage over UPFs. And it will be a matter of communication.
Earning consumer trust
But yet, consumer scepticism towards synbio exists. While younger demographics, particularly Millennials and Gen Z, show greater openness to these innovations, many consumers remain wary. Multiple studies indicate that many consumers view cultured meat as unnatural, which negatively impacts their acceptance of these products. Meanwhile, research from the Good Food Institute confirms that while sustainability is valued, it is not the key driver of purchasing decisions.
To overcome this, synbio companies must embrace transparency and third-party validation. Certifications such as the Non-GMO Project’s Non-UPF Verified label have helped distinguish minimally processed foods from industrially engineered ones. Synbio must take a similar approach – educating consumers and regulators, demonstrating its health benefits, and ensuring it is seen as an advancement, not just another iteration of processed food.
Investing heavily in nutritional studies, safety research, and clear communication is a non-negotiable. Without robust, independent data proving health benefits and safety, synbio will struggle to gain consumer trust and regulatory approval. The companies that prioritise scientific rigour and transparency will define the next era of food systems.
The UPF backlash is forcing a cultural shift in American food policy, and synbio companies cannot afford to be passive. The term “natural” remains one of the most powerful marketing claims in the industry, driving billions in consumer spending, yet it has no regulatory definition. Synbio companies must proactively define their place within this evolving landscape – aligning with consumer trust, prioritizing clear health benefits, and ensuring their innovations do not get swept away in the fight against UPFs.
The message is clear: the future of food systems will not be determined by sustainability claims alone. Synbio must prove itself as a superior alternative – not just to industrialised food, but to the very system that made UPFs dominant in the first place. If it fails to make this case, it risks being cast aside with the processed foods of the past. If it succeeds, it could become the defining food innovation of our era – a legitimate, forward-thinking solution for healthier humans and a thriving natural ecosystem.
Some headline writers and critics suggest an “anti-vegan backlash” is growing – protein and politics are key factors, but these narratives are missing the point.
Veganism is dead, long live veganism!
This month, the Daily Telegraph and Financial Times both suggested that an “anti-vegan backlash” has begun, one that has “made Britain fall back in love with meat” and is a clapback from carnivores. In response, The Spectator came out with its own take: “Blame vegans for the ‘anti-vegan backlash’.”
It comes just as research shows that the popularity of veganism today has “returned to pre-2020 levels”, according to food magazine Chef’s Pencil.
That assertion is based on Google Trends data, which found that the searches for related topics fell to levels last seen in 2016. Social media analysis also showed that the Instagram account for Veganuary witnessed a “dramatic slowdown in growth” from 49,600 new followers in January 2020 to just 5,500 in January 2025.
Courtesy: Chef’s Pencil
To make matters worse, sales of plant-based meat fell by 9% between July 2023 and 2024 in the US (though it’s still selling better than pre-pandemic levels), and 7% in the UK. And yes, a host of vegan restaurants have closed, including those owned or backed by celebrities, while others have put meat on their menu and then closed.
Moreover, investment in plant-based startups is down. Compared to 2022, when vegan companies raised $1.2B, venture capital flowing into this category has fallen by 74%, attracting just $309M last year.
So how have we got to this point? And is it truly all over for vegans?
People seem to want more protein, and not from plants
Graphic by Green Queen Media & Robbie Lockie.
One of the biggest criticisms of vegan meat alternative products today is that they’re processed. The same way hot dogs and whiskey are.
In the US, 73% of the food supply is made up of ultra-processed foods (UPF), contributing to 60% of the country’s calorie consumption. Plant-based meat has suffered due to its classification as a UPF, even though the real problem lies with fizzy drinks, sugary bakes, and salty snacks.
But as Americans try to eat healthier in the Ozempic era, questions about the health impacts of meat alternatives are louder than ever – however unfounded they may be.
Then there’s the protein brigade. For as long as they’ve been around, plant-based products have been attacked for not having enough protein. It doesn’t matter that most meat analogues actually match the protein levels of the products they’re trying to replace, and some overtake them.
Americans already eat too much meat – red meat consumption alone is 10 times higher than what scientists recommend. In fact, most of the Global North does. At the same time, we’re not eating enough fibre, a crucial nutrient for the gut microbiome and overall wellness (which conveniently, many plant-based meat products have in spades, along with equivalent amounts of protein). For some reason, though, we want more protein than ever.
Courtesy: Madre Brava/Profundo
In 2024, protein was the nutrient Americans were most interested in consuming, as cited by 71% of respondents to a large survey. However, we’re not turning to plants for this – instead, online influencers have us gorging on meat, raw milk, and beef tallow.
In the UK, too, more youngsters are increasing their meat intake (19%) than reducing it (16%) – despite half of them acknowledging that it causes harm to the planet. Meanwhile, only 45% of Brits say they trust plant-based proteins.
Across Europe, less than one in five people (18%) avoid animal products. And moving forward, only a quarter would like to phase out meat and dairy, while 12% would like to increase their consumption.
We’re eating crisps made from chicken breast, tortilla chips fried in tallow, shakes containing bone broth, and unpasteurised milk. And we’re doing so in the name of freedom and nutrition, it seems – despite experts warning about bird flu, saturated fat intake, and fibre deficiencies.
Politics plays its part
Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons/CC | Composite by Green Queen
Spearheaded by figures like Elon Musk – never one to shy away from a culture war – the pro-meat movement is reflective of the larger political landscape, one where wokeism is unwelcome and DEI policies are blamed for plane crashes.
But it’s not just alpha males and ultra-masculine gym bros who are leading the carnivorous diet charge – women from their late 20s to early 40s make up the majority of the market for brands like Equip Foods, which sells products like grass-fed beef protein and colostrum gummies, as per the Financial Times.
Then there’s the backlash against climate change. With President Donald Trump back in the White House, the US is once again pulling out of the Paris Agreement, which should come as no surprise given that the climate-denying president did so in his first term too. Moreover, Trump has demanded all mentions of the climate crisis be scrubbed from government websites.
He may be flanked by former environmentalists in Musk and Robert F Kennedy Jr, but these two are figureheads for the people who’ve put personal power over the planet. The former has raised doubts over the scientifically established climate harms of animal agriculture and added information from a climate alarmism think tank on his Department of Government Efficiency website. The latter, now the health secretary, has railed against “fake meat” products despite their environmental superiority.
It aligns with the narrative pedalled by the meat industry, which would have you believe that plant-based food isn’t sustainable, despite animal agriculture accounting for up to a fifth of global emissions. In addition, the meat lobby will dupe you into thinking that overlong ingredient lists are 1. universally bad (they’re not) and 2. only found in vegan products (they’re not).
Vegan numbers have remained steady, and it’s not all about diet
These arguments have been successful in turning people against and away from meat alternatives, gutting sales and sometimes entire businesses. But it doesn’t mean veganism is dead.
“We are definitely in an adjustment phase. Health-conscious consumers are also seeking less processed meat alternatives, so we are seeing natural protein sources such as tofu, tempeh, chickpeas, and lentils grow in popularity,” Toni Vernelli, Veganuary’s head of communication and policy engagement, told Chef’s Pencil.
That’s just it though – plant-based isn’t all about meat analogues. Heck, these products aren’t even the largest part of the market. That distinction goes to non-dairy milk, which is bought by nearly half (44%) of homes in America, and over 35% in Germany and the UK.
And in any case, vegan population numbers have remained steady over the years. In the UK – where these headlines have originated from – between 2-3% of consumers say they follow a vegan diet, a trend that has been consistent since 2019, according to YouGov surveys. Government data, meanwhile, puts this at 1.5%, according to The Vegan Society.
Courtesy: YouGov
Veganism has been growing in Asia too. In 2021, a tenth of Indians identified as vegan, and this has remained steady this year too. Similarly, the number of vegans in Singapore has grown from 7% in 2020 to 9% today.
But perhaps the most crucial misconception of this argument is that veganism is all about diet – it’s not. Veganism is, as The Vegan Society explains, a “philosophy and way of living” that excludes all forms of animal exploitation – for food, clothing and other purposes.
It’s why we see companies making animal-free leather and silk, cruelty-free cosmetics, and vegan toothpaste and shampoos. Veganism isn’t dead – if it were, investors and companies wouldn’t still be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these products.
Most of the population may not change their way of living. But as media investigations and social media continue to shine a harsh light on how we treat animals – which remains shocking, cruel and inhumane – and the true environmental impact of farming them, it’s likely the philosophy of veganism will continue to attract adherents.
As anti-cultivated-meat legislation heats up in the US, Nebraska and South Dakota’s efforts to ban these proteins are facing opposition from some policymakers – and farmers.
For Americans in government office, it’s almost become fashionable to attempt a ban on cultivated meat.
The ball went rolling with Ron DeSantis and Florida, which outlawed the production and sale of cultivated meat last summer, followed shortly by its neighbour, Alabama.
These bills got through state legislature pretty quickly, positioned as efforts to safeguard the local cattle industry and public health. But they’re also so far the only instances of such efforts being successful.
More than 20 states across the US have floated measures to ban cultivated meat or restrict how these proteins are labelled. A lot of it feels like a publicity stunt – some of it probably is.
A few of these legislative attempts have come and gone without posing any real threat of being passed. This week, two bills in Nebraska and South Dakota hit a snag too, facing pushback from fellow legislators, and surprisingly, cattle farmers.
South Dakota votes against cultivated meat ban
Courtesy: South Dakota Governor’s Office
There are three anti-cultivated-meat-bills of note in South Dakota, all introduced in January. The first originated in the House, and requires cell-cultured proteins to be clearly labelled as such to prevent any “misbranding”. This passed unanimously, and was signed into law by Governor Larry Rhoden – it will come into effect on July 1.
The second bill sought to prohibit the state from financing any research, production or distribution of cultivated meat. This was unanimously passed on Thursday, and is on its way to Rhoden’s desk – but it includes an exception for public universities conducting research on these proteins.
However, the same day, HB 1109 also went to a vote in the Senate. This bill went the furthest, replicating Florida and Alabama’s measure to put an outright ban on the sale of cultivated meat within the state. Anyone found violating the law – if the bill became one – would be charged with a Class 2 misdemeanour.
Unlike the other two bills, this last one failed to pass through the Senate. Previous votes in the House and agricultural committees were also far from unanimous. On Wednesday, there was a 17-17 in the Senate, and upon reconsideration a day later, senators voted 19-16 against the legislation.
It came after two Republican senators who had previously voted in favour of the ban chose to oppose it in the subsequent vote. One of them, Amber Hulse, told South Dakota Searchlight: “I think the constitutionality of the bill, if I’m being quite honest, is questionable.”
Nebraska bill faces pushback from the meat industry
Courtesy: Governor Jim Pillen/X
In Nebraska, Governor Jim Pillen’s mission to outlaw cultivated meat has been particularly aggressive. He introduced an executive order back in August to put restrictions on these proteins and named a ban one of his top priorities for 2025.
At his request, Senator Barry DeKay brought forward LB 246 last month to keep cultivated meat from being manufactured or sold in Nebraska, and requiring it to be labelled as an “adulterated food product” under the Pure Food Act.
The bill is still in its early stages, with the Agriculture Committee hearing the proposal earlier this week. It’s already encountering pushback – and not from who you expect.
According to the Associated Press, some of its most prominent opponents are the very people Pillen said he’s trying to protect. Nebraska’s ranchers and farming groups say they don’t need the government’s help to compete with cultivated meat.
One farmer told the AP that he welcomes cultivated meat producers to “jump into the pool” and try to compete with his Waygu beef, going on to describe his disdain for lawmakers’ efforts to stifle competition in a free market.
He noted that governments should only be limited to regulating product labels and facility inspections – something that the US Department of Agriculture already does when assessing novel food dossiers. “After that, it’s up to the consumer to make the decision about what they buy and eat,” said the beef farmer.
Latest in a long list of failed cultivated meat bills
Courtesy: Eat Just
These are just the latest examples of industry criticism and failures of bills hoping to ban cultivated meat. In Ohio, for example, two House Representatives introduced HB10 to prohibit the sale of “misbranded” alternative proteins; this came after their previous bill designed to restrict labelling, which died in the House Agriculture Committee last year.
And even in Congress, a bipartisan bill to ban cultivated meat in schools – co-sponsored by Democrat Jon Tester and Republican Mike Rounds – never made it past the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry.
This year, a spate of new proposals from legislators in states including South Carolina, West Virginia, Montana, Georgia (among others) have come under consideration – though based on the path of these other bills, they just feel like a waste of time and resources.
Florida is already facing legal action against its ban, after receiving criticism from the country’s oldest and largest trade association, which represents 95% of the US’s meat output. In a letter sent to DeSantis in March 2024, the North American Meat Institute called the ban “bad public policy”.
“These bills establish a precedent for adopting policies and regulatory requirements that could one day adversely affect the bills’ supporters,” it said, emphasising the importance of consumer choice.
The EU has published its much-anticipated food and farming vision, raising alarm bells among climate experts and ignoring calls for a shift to plant-based proteins.
These are just some of the reactions to the EU’s new vision for agriculture and food, unveiled yesterday by ag commissioner Christophe Hansen.
The policy document is set to define how the future of food and farming is governed in the region and is centred on simplification, digitalisation, and research and innovation.
What it doesn’t focus on is the climate, a marked departure from Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s first-term flagship European Green Deal, which included the Farm to Fork strategy.
Grateful to the Strategic Dialogue & Chair Prof. Strohschneider.
For their vision and concrete recommendations for an agriculture that works with and for nature.
And that promotes a competitive European food value chain.
While von der Leyen promised that the agrifood vision would be based on the conclusions of the Strategic Dialogue on the Future of EU Agriculture, in which stakeholders including farmer lobby groups and climate activists advised the Commission to shift towards a more sustainable agrifood sector and create an EU-wide action plan for plant-based foods.
But the final vision ignores the outcome of the Strategic Dialogue, despite calls for the EU to stick to it by everyone from doctors, consumer groups, climate experts, and even some of the largest food companies.
It leaves the EU’s protein diversification in limbo, and keeps out future food innovation (like alternative proteins), at the same time its member states are actively encouraging citizens to eat less meat and more plants, and implementing carbon taxes on livestock farming.
What did the Strategic Dialogue recommend?
Graphic by Green Queen
The 29 organisations behind the Strategic Dialogue had five broad recommendations to advance the EU’s food system: creating a more competitive future, advancing towards a sustainable agrifood sector, promoting climate resilience, building agricultural diversity, and broadening access to knowledge and innovation.
The document acknowledged that meat consumption is too high in the EU, and called for a transition from animal proteins to plant-based options. “The sustainable choice needs to become the choice by default,” the report said, asking the Commission to develop a plant-based strategy to strengthen the agrifood chain “from farmers all the way to consumers”.
It also namechecked other alternative protein technologies like precision fermentation and products such as cultivated meat, as part of a range of “concrete technological innovations” that stakeholders debate over – whether to call for faster approval or raise questions about their potential safety risks.
The spotlight on sustainable diets didn’t set any targets for cutting back meat production, though the report advised policymakers to update food labelling regulations to let consumers make informed food choices around sustainability and animal welfare – the EU currently doesn’t allow food producers to use terms like ‘milk’ and ‘cheese’ on alt-dairy labels.
These recommendations came in light of the fact that agriculture is responsible for 11% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions, and 84% of these come from livestock. That’s despite animal-based foods providing 35% of calories and 65% of proteins in the region.
The meat and dairy sector is also heavily subsidised, receiving four times as much public money as plant-based farming, and around 82% of the subsidies under the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP).
What does the agrifood vision include?
Courtesy: Getty Images | Composite by Green Queen
Essentially, none of the above.
Despite the Dialogue’s strong focus on plant-based proteins and diversification, these terms don’t appear in the agrifood vision at all. ‘Livestock’, however, appears 19 times.
“Livestock is and will remain an essential part of EU agriculture, competitiveness and cohesion,” the Commission wrote, acknowledging that “sustainable livestock” is crucial to the bloc’s economy.
The only reference to protein production and consumption imbalances reads: “We need to consider both the way protein is produced and consumed in the EU.” The Commission promised to deliver a “comprehensive plan” to address these challenges.
The document noted that the European Food Safety Authority would need reinforcements to speed up safety assessments and clear regulatory bottlenecks – at the same time, there was a pointed dig at novel technologies like cultivated meat.
“Keeping Europe’s innovation edge in such new technologies is paramount for the sector to remain competitive and for the EU to remain a world leader in food innovation,” the report stated. “At the same time, certain food innovation is sometimes seen as a threat to the traditions and culture across Europe.”
It added: “This calls for an enhanced dialogue on this matter and better knowledge, to make sure that these innovations can be assessed in an inclusive way that also considers social, ethical, economic, environmental and cultural aspects of food innovation.”
The EU will also hold a Food Dialogue every year with stakeholders across the value chain, as part of which it will launch a study on the consumption of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) – this could have a knock-on effect on meat alternatives too, which have been misleadingly criticised by some as unhealthy because they’re UPFs.
As for the much-criticised CAP, the EU promised to better reward farmers who “actively engage” in climate-friendly food production, an approach that would prioritise agricultural products essential to the EU’s strategic autonomy and resilience.
“This could indicate increased support for plant protein production (whether just feed or also food is to be seen),” Rafael Pinto, senior policy manager at the European Vegetarian Union, tells Green Queen. “Overall, it mentions the need for a fairer distribution of subsidies, especially for small and medium farms – something that is needed but is mentioned in almost every CAP document since the beginning of the policy.”
Why does the agrifood vision ignore the Strategic Dialogue?
Courtesy: European Parliament
If you’ve been following EU food policy for a while, this may not have come as a surprise to you. At his confirmation hearing, farm commissioner Hansen hinted at this outcome, calling the Strategic Dialogue “rather a vague formulation” and suggesting more detailed discourse was needed.
He added that meat was “part of a balanced diet”. And though he noted that the EU was “massively underproducing” plant proteins, his focus was on producing more soybeans to feed animals, who would then be fed to humans.
The EU also has a history of giving in to lobby pressure and flip-flopping on its own proposals, including several aspects of the Green Deal. Most recently, the Commission was set to unveil a sustainable food systems framework to support the protein transition at the end of its previous mandate and ended up abandoning the plan after backlash from interest groups.
Something similar happened with the agrifood vision too. “Right after the end of the Strategic Dialogue, some of the biggest industry representatives decided to detach themselves from something they previously agreed on and cherry-pick only the policies that reflected their views – contrary to NGOs that would gladly accept the conclusions as a whole,” explained Pinto. “It seems like the Vision was highly and disproportionately influenced by some key economic interests.”
He added that the release of the vision “officially marked the death of the Farm2Fork Strategy”, the EU’s plan for sustainable agriculture: “With this new approach, it seems like decarbonising agriculture and promoting healthier diets are not priorities for the Commission. The over-reliance (and naivety) on tech fixes for the livestock sector risk under-delivering and undermining our broader sustainability goals.”
What happens now?
Courtesy: Dimarik/Getty Image, Alessandro0770/Getty Images, Canva AI | Composite by Green Queen
Pinto suggests that the EU Commission isn’t necessarily against promoting the protein transition in itself. “[I’d] rather, maybe hopefully, believe that the Commission showed a neutral stance towards protein diversification,” he said.
“Protein transition is required for sustainability, health, animal welfare and food security and this has been recognised several times by the Commission. However, the lack of policies to that effect shows that current political will is low and pressure from strong interest groups is high.”
Both the European Council and Parliament will be reacting to the vision in the weeks to come, so there’s still time to address the shortcomings in the agrifood vision.
“We hope the EU agriculture and food policies don’t limit themselves to this vision. There’s a lot of room for progress in other areas, and the vision leaves the door open to have a dialogue on innovation and alternatives. The vision is a framework that hopefully will expand over the mandate to better align with other policies and targets,” says Pinto.
He adds: “Protein diversification is a key solution for the polycrisis. It can support environmental and climate goals, reduce disease burden, improve EU food security [and] competitiveness, diversify farmers’ portfolios, and ensure long-term farm sustainability. This is clear for most stakeholders, but we need more political will to address the issue.”
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.
Heather Courtney is General Partner at Alwyn Capital.
What future food technologies most excite you?
Technologies that can be applied across multiple markets. Many early-stage companies in alternative protein have struggled to raise funding over the last 18 months, as investors have shifted from prioritizing growth at all costs to focusing on revenue.
If companies have technology that can be applied to existing industries while keeping an eye on serving frontier industries as they scale, they can generate early revenue while capturing the upside of future innovations.
What are three future food verticals you are actively looking at for 2025?
Technologies that reduce COGS and improve quality in plant-based, fermentation, and cultivated products (e.g., media recycling in cultivated meat, continuous bioprocessing in fermentation).
Advanced manufacturing machinery and techniques for alternative proteins.
Precision fermentation—yes, this is probably a popular answer right now, but there’s a good reason. There is immense opportunity in strain engineering, cheaper feedstocks, more efficient bioreactors, and continuous bioprocessing to drive costs down and yields up. One of our portfolio companies, Sunflower TX, is developing precisely this kind of technology. Sunflower has created the first microbial perfusion fermentation system designed for continuous protein production, enabling more protein to be produced with less space and lower costs.
What do you consider the food tech sector’s greatest achievement in the past five years?
Bringing truly “future food” products to market – Upside Foods’s cultivated chicken filet, Perfect Day’s precision fermentation whey, GOOD Meat’s cultivated chicken, and EVERY’s hen-less egg, to name a few. Yes, there is still much work to be done, and no, these products aren’t perfect yet. But let’s take a moment to appreciate them for what they are: significant milestones in food innovation.
If you could wave a magic wand, how would you fix plant-based meat?
A serious magic wand? I’d abolish subsidies for animal agriculture so that plant-based meat could compete on a level playing field.
Beyond that, plant-based meat has a messaging problem. We’ve spoken to Sonalie [Figueiras, Green Queen’s founder and editor-in-chief] about this at length, and I agree with her—our industry has forgotten that women, specifically moms, make the majority of household purchasing decisions. We need to focus on what moms care about: their family’s health, saving time, and making life easier. We need to fix our messaging.
What’s the top trait you look for in a founder?
Tenacity. (There’s a lot more than one, but you only wanted one.)
The One That Got Away: What is the deal you wish you had gotten into but didn’t?
The one we missed knows who they are—we’re still in touch and tracking the company. We were deep in diligence when the lead investor decided they wanted the entire round.
What do you consider your most successful future food investment so far?
It’s too early to tell with most of our portfolio, but Cultured Decadence was acquired in 2020, so that was a clear win! We have other high-performing portfolio companies, but we’ll only know they’re real successes when they achieve an exit. Ultimately, true success will come when the industry takes off across all verticals, creating a win for people, the planet, and animals.
What has been your most disappointing investment so far?
We had a company shut down in 2022. It was one of our favourite products, and the founder had a great work ethic and the right team, but COVID wreaked havoc on them, and they couldn’t recover. Robert and I did everything we could to create a better outcome for the company, but in the end, they folded. That one still hurts.
What do people misunderstand/get wrong most about VC?
Not every business is a good fit for VC dollars, and that’s completely fine. We look for companies that, if everything goes to plan, could return the entire fund through that one investment—not every company is built for that kind of trajectory. You might have a solid business that could grow into a very large enterprise, but if it can’t do that within 10 years or less, VC funding might not be the right fit.
What is the most ‘future food’ thing you have eaten this month?
It wasn’t this month, so maybe I’m cheating a little here, but a few months ago, Robert and I tasted the latest iteration of New School Foods‘ plant-based salmon filet. It was so spot-on that it was unsettling. I even heard a fish eater say they thought it was virtually indistinguishable from conventional salmon. Seafood has been notoriously difficult to replicate with plant proteins—until now. New School Foods has changed the game.
Where is your favourite climate-forward restaurant/dish/place to eat anywhere in the world?
There’s a great spot near my mum’s house in St. Petersburg, FL, called Good Intentions. They make a plant-based dish called Crab Fries—a pile of fries with shredded hearts of palm and jackfruit, Old Bay, garlic butter, parsley, shredded parmesan, and aioli. I didn’t know I needed Crab Fries in my life until I had them, and now I’m obsessed.
It’s a tough time for restaurants right now, especially those sourcing local, sustainable ingredients. So many of my favorite plant-based restaurants in NYC and beyond have closed. If there’s a spot you love, please support them.
What’s your ‘why’? What motivates you to do what you do?
My love for animals drives everything I do. I envision a future where they are no longer treated as expendable. At Alwyn Capital, we are working to make that vision a reality—one that benefits animals, people, and the planet.
I began my career as a pharmaceutical researcher—I loved working in a lab and learning how biological systems function. Now, I have the privilege of collaborating with founders operating at the frontiers of biotechnology to build a more sustainable future.
Israel’s Ever After Foods has partnered with Swiss manufacturing giant Bühler Group to produce cultivated meat at a mass scale with much smaller equipment.
Extending its sustainable protein push, Bühler Group has teamed up with an Israeli food tech firm to help streamline cultivated meat production.
Ever After Foods – a joint venture between cellular agriculture firm Pluri and the Tnuva Group (Israel’s largest food company) – will work with Bühler to bring to market a commercial-scale system that can produce cultivated meat using equipment at least 10 times smaller than the industry standard.
“We are overcoming the bioreactor sizing conundrum,” Eyal Rosenthal, CEO of Ever After Foods, told Green Queen. “Where others need an absolutely enormous 20,000-litre bioreactor, our system produces the same volume with less than 2,000 litres, making it more efficient and viable.”
He added that Bühler will “play a critical role in our mission to create the next, more sustainable, era of meat production”.
Shifting away from the pharma world
Courtesy: Ever After Foods
Formerly named Plurinuva, Ever After Foods has exclusive licencing rights to use Pluri’s technology and intellectual property to commercialise cultivated meat.
Its proprietary edible packed-bed (EPB) technology platform – which comprises a patented 3D cell expansion environment to mimic the cells’ natural environment – dramatically lowers production costs. And its bioreactors yield up to six times more protein and 700 times more lipids from each cell, offering better flavour and nutritional value.
“Consumers will not compromise on taste and texture. Our production system is specifically designed for cultivated meat production, which is a complete step-change from traditional cultivated meat technologies. Another element that sets us apart is that our system does not compromise on the final product, delivering real meat rather than cell slurry, while achieving outstanding efficiency,” explained Rosenthal.
Scalability is another key market barrier. According to consultancy giant McKinsey, to meet the industry’s growth demands, cultivated meat firms would need up to 22 times more fermentation capacity than currently exists in the global pharmaceutical sector.
“Where traditional stirred-tank systems require 4,000 litres to produce 80kg of cultivated meat, our system uses only 200 litres without costly retention devices such as attenuated tangential flow or tangential flow filtration,” said Rosenthal. “This results in at least a 90% reduction in production costs and significantly lower capex, enabling cost parity with conventional meat.”
The process is also much more climate-friendly than industrially raising livestock, resulting in 93% less air pollution, 95% less land use, and 94% less water consumption.
Ever After Foods: working on several cell lines
Courtesy: Ever After Foods
Ever After Foods says it’s working closely with cultivated meat makers and food industry leaders to speed up the development and global deployment of its EPB system – the partnership with Bühler is an extension of that effort.
“Their support will help us scale up and ensure cultivated meat producers around the globe can access scalable, affordable food production systems. Having a respected player like Bühler supporting us is crucial for ensuring that our technology meets the highest standards in the food industry,” said Rosenthal.
The company – which raised $10M in June – is one of several innovators pushing Israel’s food tech economy forward. The country was the third to approve the sale of cultivated meat, greenlighting local startup Aleph Farms‘s application in December 2023.
Israel has additionally made food tech one of its top five priority R&D areas and attracted 10% of all VC funding ($1.2B) in the alternative protein sector between 2014 and 2023.
“We are working with several leading cultivated meat and global food and meat companies across species like beef, chicken, duck, and fish,” said Rosenthal.
Bühler advances future food focus as profits grow
Bühler Group CTO Ian Roberts | Courtesy: Bühler Group
“Powering cultivated meat production at scale with a patented production system, Ever After Foods will help the food industry keep pace with the protein demands of a growing global population,” said Bühler CTO Ian Roberts.
The collaboration is part of Bühler’s goal of enabling market-ready, healthy cell-based products that are friendly to the wallet and the planet and can address global challenges like food insecurity. It comes days after the company reported a turnover of $3.3B for 2024, making a net profit of $209M (a 5.5% increase from the previous year).
“The global food chain faces significant challenges if we are to successfully and sustainably feed our growing population. How we produce and consume protein will continue to change, and requires a transition of our protein system to deliver this,” said Roberts.
In December, it opened The Cultured Hub, a cellular agriculture scale-up plant, in partnership with Swiss retail giant Migros and flavour specialist Givaudan. Situated in The Valley in Kemptthal, the factory can support the development of products like cultivated meat, fermentation-derived dairy, cell-based chocolate, and more.
Our weekly column rounds up the latest sustainable food innovation news. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers NotCo’s Dubai chocolate, BrewDog’s collaboration with Impossible Foods, and new products at Expo West.
New products and launches
Chilean AI-led food tech player NotCo has releasedDubai Style NotSquare, a vegan version of the viral pistachio-kunafa-filled chocolate bar.
Courtesy: Matias Muchnick/LinkedIn
Scottish pub chain BrewDog has partnered with Impossible Foods to introduce a vegan chicken menu across 48 UK locations, which includes cheeseburgers and tacos made from the latter’s Chicken FIllets, as well as nuggets. The limited-edition menu is running until the end of March.
UK oat milk chocolate maker Happi has rolled out Salted Honeycomb and Cherry & Almond Easter eggs, which contain 35% less sugar than mass-market brands and are available at Waitrose and other retailers for £11.99 per 155g egg.
British sports nutrition brand Myprotein has launched a caramel-pecan flavour of its double-dough brownie in collaboration with Hotel Chocolat. It’s available on its website for £25.99 for a box of 12.
Courtesy: Continental Wine & Food
Yorkshire-based Continental Wine & Food has launchedLacey’s Vodkashake, a line of dairy-free cream liqueurs available in strawberry and banana flavours. Inspired by 1950s-style American diner milkshakes, the 15% ABV product is stocked at 500 B&M stores, retailing for £12 per 70cl bottle.
Elsewhere, Indian plant-based meat brand GoodDot has obtained a listing at Australian health food store Wholefood Merchants.
Also in Australia, Coyo has unveiled a dairy-free yoghurt line made with 74% oat milk and 17% coconut cream. They come in natural, vanilla bean, mango and strawberry flavours, and will be stocked at Woolworths and independent retailers nationwide starting March.
Courtesy: Coyo
Amid the US egg shortage, UK startup Crackd – which makes the pourable vegan No-Egg Egg – is gearing up for a launch stateside, and will have a booth at Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim, California (March 5-7).
Also at Expo West, alt-dairy leader Elmhurst 1925 will debut three new products: unsweetened vanilla cashew milk, barista cashew milk, and unsweetened coconut-cashew barista milk.
Courtesy: Colruyt
And Belgian retailer Colruyt Group has launchedBoni Plan’t, a plant-based brand under its Boni Selection private label. The move unites over 100 existing meat-free products under the new label, with several new items to be added in the coming months.
Company and finance updates
Swedish dairy giant Valio has acquiredRaisio‘s plant protein business, which includes the Härkis and Beanit fava bean brands, for €7M. The deal will see 16 employees transferred to Valio.
After two years of tumult, Swedish oat milk giant Oatlyreported a 5% hike in revenue for both Q4 and the full year of 2024, and expects 2025 to be its “first full year of profitable growth as a public company”.
Courtesy: Nespresso
In northern Spain, Hijos de Rivera, Inproteins and the Xunta de Galicia have invested €7.5M in a new plant protein manufacturing facility. The project will receive a total of €18M in funding, supported by the Galician Institute for Economic Promotion and Banco Sabadell.
In the UK, AI-driven meal-planning platform Remy has acquiredKitche, an app that helps prevent food waste at the household level.
Dutch cultivated pork producerMeatablehosted a cross-industry event with 80 stakeholders to discuss sustainable proteins and the future of food.
Courtesy: Meatable
Speaking of cellular agriculture, Singapore’s Umami Bioworks has introduced a cultivated seafood platform to address protein diversity in the pet food industry. It comes as the firm works with another startup to commercialise cat treats made with cultivated fish, and just after the first cultivated pet food launched in the UK earlier this month.
Policy developments
Californian alternative protein pioneer Eat Just and its cultivated meat subsidiary, Good Meat, have reached an “agreement in principle” to settle their legal dispute with bioreactor supplier ABEC.
Courtesy: Eat Just
Israeli startup Yeap has announced that its upcycled yeast protein now meets EU regulatory requirements, paving the way for its market entry in the region.
The European Plant-Based Foods Association (formerly the European Natural Soyfood Association, or ENSA) has changed its name to Plant-Based Foods Europe to “better reflect the industry’s dynamic landscape”.
After more than 70 years, Humane Society International and the Humane Society of the United States have changed their name to Humane World for Animals, marking the occasion with a new ad campaign featuringSia.
In a written submission, the UK government is being urged by The Vegan Society to raise awareness of vegans in the parliament to prevent harassment and bullying, as well as increase plant-based options for policymakers.
Finally, in New Zealand, the Vegan Society of Aotearoa and the New Zealand Vegetarian Society have handed in a petition to ban the misleading labelling of animal-free products, since there’s no legislation to determine what products qualify as vegan or vegetarian in the country.
The world’s most populous generation, Gen Alpha, thinks future foods like plant-based and cultivated meat are “inevitable” – though first impressions matter.
By the end of the decade, Gen Alpha will have a spending power worth $12 trillion, on top of being the largest generation the world has ever seen.
Born between 2010 and the end of 2024 and between 0-15 years old, it’s a group of consumers who have grown up in the age of social media and climate change, and for whom sustainability will be a central life aspect. Research shows that saving the planet will be the main career mission for two-thirds of these children, and 80% of their parents have already been influenced to lead more eco-friendly lives.
Gen Alpha is becoming an increasingly important cohort for brands to market to, and it’s a generation “poised to reshape the food industry”, according to research firm Mintel. At the forefront of this shift are alternative proteins, which have been recognised by numerous scientists and climate researchers as the best solution to decarbonise the global food industry.
So how do the generation of tomorrow feel about the proteins of tomorrow? It’s a question scientists at Singapore’s state-backed Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) contended with in a recent study, interviewing 19 sets of Gen Alphas and their parents about their attitudes towards plant-based and cultivated meat, and insect protein.
The study, published in the Appetite journal, found that plant-based meat is the most well-known out of the three protein groups. Among the children, 63% have heard of vegan alternatives, while 42% are aware of cultivated meat. Several kids had heard of the latter via the news, TikTok, YouTube, or STEM festivals.
More than a third (37%) of Gen Alphas have tried plant-based meat too, and encouragingly, nearly 80% are willing to give it a go. Interest in cultivated meat is high too among this younger generation too- as 74% are happy to try these proteins.
What’s holding Gen Alpha back?
Courtesy: Impossible Foods
There are several barriers the alternative protein industry needs to attend to. In answering whether they’ve tried cultivated meat, some parents mixed up products like Impossible Foods’ offerings with these novel foods – highlighting an awareness gap.
Those who are more aware and knowledgeable about alternative proteins showcase a greater willingness to consume them, though familiarity worked against these foods too. Some children expressed a preference for conventional meat purely because it’s what they’re used to.
This also ties in with food tech neophobia, or a fear of new foods made from novel technologies. Some children describe alternative proteins as “weird”, while this concern is even more prominent among parents, especially with cultivated meat.
Meanwhile, concerns about the cleanliness of alternative protein production plants, their nutritional value, and perceived “unnaturalness” deter some parents. However, those aware of the health risks and antibiotic usage in meat production categorize plant-based meat as healthier, though they want to consume it as a supplementary protein instead of a complete replacement.
Finally, there are some cultural and religious hurdles too. For children and parents who identify as Muslim, for example, their willingness to eat cultivated meat is contingent on its Halal certification. In 2024, the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore issued a fatwa declaring that cultivated meat is generally halal, and Muslims can eat these products as long as they adhere to halal standards.
Children and parents can influence each other to eat sustainable proteins
Courtesy: Upside Foods
Since cultivated meat is deemed a novel food with no history of consumption, it requires authorisation from national regulators to be sold in a country’s market. Singapore was the first nation to approve the sale of such products after the Singapore Food Agency concluded that Eat Just’s Good Meat chicken was safe for consumption back in 2020. It followed up with further greenlights for Vow‘s cultured quail and foie gras last year.
For Gen Alpha, historical consumption of food is an indicator of safety and healthiness; however, they question the safety of cultivated meat due to its lack of consumption history. Parents cite the same reason for associating a greater risk with eating cultivated meat.
The study labelled bi-directional influence as a social opportunity for alternative proteins. “Parents’ food habits, opinions, beliefs, and preferences influenced their children’s willingness to consume alternative proteins and acted as both a facilitator and a barrier. Overall, most parents were open to letting their children consume alternative proteins,” the authors wrote.
At the same time, there were instances of children who influenced their parents to try alternative proteins. One survey participant noted how they were initially “quite averse” to Impossible meat, but eventually tried it when their son said: “Come on, have a taste.”
Prices, clarity, and first impressions are critical
Courtesy: Eat Just
There are several things alternative protein companies need to do to get in with the consumers of tomorrow. Plant-based and cultivated meats need to be the same price, if not cheaper, than conventional proteins – Gen Alpha prefers to pay less for the former category because they either don’t involve animals, so are perceived as easier and faster to produce.
Clear labelling should be a priority too – both parents and children confused certain plant-based brands with cultivated meat in the study. They also develop a greater appetite for alternative proteins that match animal-derived meat in taste and other sensory attributes.
Finally, the research revealed that first impressions are critical – for the entire industry. “Children and their parents often reported the importance of liking alternative proteins the first time they tried them,” the study noted. “They went on to say that any negative experience would result in them being less willing to consume alternative proteins again, including other products and brands.”
However, environmental sustainability is a major motivator for the consumption of alternative proteins among Gen Alpha, who are willing to embrace these foods – they told researchers that “alternative proteins were the inevitable future” and want to eat them to adapt to the changing climate.
As more Brits, Europeans and Americans cool on meat alternatives, one region is making gains on the protein transition – can homegrown brands in the Gulf cater to local demand for plant-based meat?
While some consumers in the West are turning their back on planet-friendly meat alternatives, citing reasons like inflation and unsatisfactory flavour, those in Africa and the Middle East are bucking the trend.
A growing number of consumers in the Gulf region are embracing plant-based food, as locals look for more sustainable options. While most meat analogues in the region have long been imported, which has often meant high markups for shoppers, a wave of homegrown companies is looking to change this.
A handful of startups are providing alternatives to more expensive products from international players like Kerry Group, Beyond Meat, Quorn, Amy’s Kitchen, and others while catering to the region’s youth. More than half of the GCC’s population is under 25, and across the world, younger generations tend to lead the plant-based charge.
In parallel, as concerns around food insecurity intensify, regional governments are recognising the potential of alternative proteins to safeguard the local food supply, providing the niche sector with added momentum.
Plant-based food in the Gulf in numbers
Courtesy: Redseer
The GCC plant-based market is expected to expand significantly by the end of the decade, reaching $500M at a 35% CAGR. This is nearly double the industry’s predicted growth in the wider Middle East and Africa (MENA) region.
While frequent consumption of meat-free food decreased by at least five percentage points in North America (now at 13%), Europe (18%), and Asia-Pacific (14%) between 2023 and 2024, Africa and the Middle East (38%) is bucking the trends with encouraging growth.
As in the rest of the world, price is now the main barrier to eating more plant-based food in the Middle East, with 36% of consumers citing it. In addition, taste (33%), an unfamiliarity with eating vegan food (33%), and convenience and availability (32%) are equally important factors.
Courtesy: EAT/GlobeScan
Awareness about plant-based products is increasing in the GCC – in the UAE, 94% of people were familiar with them in 2023 (up from 91% in 2022), while in Saudi Arabia, this increased from 85% to 89% in 2023.
A good chunk of consumers are also happy to pay a premium for plant-based food in the UAE (27%) and Saudi Arabia (21%).
Around 15% of Emiratis want to cut back on meat, primarily for health reasons. And of these, 26% want to replace it with plant-based alternatives.
Taste is the top purchase driver for meat alternatives (chosen by 33% of consumers) in the region, followed by brand reputation (25%) and recommendations from others (19%).
Gulf consumers are most interested in replacing meat in their children’s meals, with nearly half (48%) saying so in the UAE, and 43% in Saudi Arabia.
Courtesy: Redseer
In Saudi Arabia, around 5% of a representative population sample followed a plant-forward diet, as of 2022, with four in five of them being women.
Nearly 40% of these consumers have difficulty finding locally inspired plant-based food, and 20% say meat alternative options are restricted.
While only 8% of Gulf consumers identified as flexitarian in 2023, this is set to rise to 23% by 2030.
The plant-based meat players leading the charge
Switch Foods
Courtesy: Switch Foods
Based in Abu Dhabi, Switch Foods was founded by Edward Hamod in 2022 and made a splash in the region’s plant-based space with the opening of a 20,000 sq ft plant-based meat factory. Situated in the capital’s Khalifa Industrial Zone, the facility manufactures meat-free kebabs, koftas, soujouks, mince, and burger patties.
These products are available at over 130 stores across a wide range of retailers, including Carrefour, Spinneys, Waitrose, Géant, Union Coop, Sharjah Co-op, and LuLu, alongside online stores like Talabat, Careem, and InstaShop.
While 95% of its initial sales came from retail, its foodservice penetration has grown significantly since. Now, Switch Foods’s plant-based meat can be found at Hilton Hotels, Millennium Hotels, Marriot, 25hours Hotel, Eataly, and onboard Emirates flights, among others.
The company has raised $6.5M in seed funding and was said to be in talks to secure another $7M in Series A funding last year. Since June 2023, it has expanded at a 20% CAGR per month, and closed that year with a revenue of around Dh2 million ($544,000) in only half a year of operations. Last year, it expected to earn a revenue of Dh10 million ($2.7M).
Thryve
Courtesy: Thryve
A subsidiary of business house IFFCO Group, one of the UAE’s largest food companies, Thryve arrived on the scene in late 2022 as part of its parent’s regenerative agriculture push. IFFCO Group has named regenerative farming and healthy soils as one of its ESG focus topics.
“We are guided by nature-based principles in our food system design, bringing nature to the core of our business decisions,” Valeria Krynetskaya, then head of Thryve, explained. “We rediscovered an ancient crop, Faba Bean with significant regenerative potential, healing soil through nitrogen fixation and saving water. We are transforming this climate-smart faba bean into faba-lous plant-based meat with local flavours of the Middle East.”
Marketed as the GCC’s first 100% plant-based venture – as opposed to meat companies that sell certain animal-free products – Thryve opened the Middle East’s first vegan meat production facility in Dubai Industrial City, and is part of a family of 80 brands with a footprint in over 100 countries.
Thryve’s fava-bean-based meats include burgers, mince, shawarma, koftas, shish tawook, chicken kabsa chunks, and nuggets, and they’re available at retailers like Carrefour, Waitrose, Lulu, Spinneys, and more in the UAE. The company has since expanded to Saudi Arabia too, and says its factory canhelp it reach 30% of the GCC population.
Arlene
Courtesy: Arlene
Founded by Helene Raudaschl in 2020, Arlene makes frozen ready-to-eat vegan meals that incorporate meat analogues. They’re produced in a 60,000 sq ft manufacturing facility in Dubai.
Arlene’s meat alternative dishes include local favourites like kebabs and kibbehs, Asian staples such as gyozas, dan dan noodles, and spring rolls, and international classics like spaghetti bolognese and chilli con carne.
The company’s products are available at Waitrose, Spinneys, and Maxzi in the UAE, as well as retailers in Singapore.
Nadura*
Courtesy: Natura*
The newest kid on the block, Nadura* is a Dubai-based subsidiary of legacy manufacturer Food Specialties Limited, which launched in 2024 with a range of meat-free proteins made from Canadian peas.
The frozen burgers, mince, chicken and kebabs are marketed as clean-label alternatives to the ultra-processed foods typically found on the market. And in 2023, its chicken mince won Bronze at the Plant-Based Excellence Award at Plant Based World Expo Europe.
While these products are currently available online at Elfab in the UAE, the company is positioning them towards the foodservice and hospitality industry – soon, you could find its plant-based meat at restaurants across the country.
Niya Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Fork & Good, on what separates the startup from other cultivated meat players, earning its first revenue, and its regulatory plans.
It was just only in January 2024 that, in an Irish pub in Davos, Switzerland, Fork & Good held Europe’s first public tasting of cultivated meat. The startup served dumplings made from a blend of 30% cell-cultured pork and 70% conventional pork (plus a cultivated and plant-based mix for vegetarians), with more than half of the taste-testers preferring the blended meat version.
This was a marker of progress for the New Jersey-based firm, getting some real-world feedback from an international group of people just 10 minutes away from the World Economic Forum conference.
Now, just over a year later, the company has earned its first revenue, courtesy of a joint development agreement with an $8B global food manufacturer. “It is an exciting milestone to earn revenue in cultivated red meat, and shows market validation of our technology,” co-founder and CEO Niya Gupta tells Green Queen, though she declines to name the company.
In fact, Fork & Good has signed deals with three clients and is in talks with about a dozen manufacturers and retailers – all focused on using cultivated pork as a complementary ingredient in both meat and plant-based formulations. Currently, the protein is being tested as part of ham and meat snacks.
“We have always been a B2B company,” says Gupta. “When we first started, African swine fever had wiped out 25% of the world’s hog herd, and our customers were struggling with reinforcing their supply chains. Pathogen shocks, tariffs, and tighter demand conditions have all resulted in significant volatility, which poses challenges in consistency of product and cost for our customers.”
Joining forces with an industry pioneer
Courtesy: Fork & Good
For Gupta, it’s hard to imagine a life without dim sum, the Cantonese term for a whole host of dumplings served for breakfast in restaurants across China. After all, she grew up in Hong Kong, which consumes more meat per capita than any other place. “My family were farmers [in India] for generations, and I spent every summer at the farm, which gave me a deep respect for agriculture and also a desire to improve our food systems,” she says.
Having spent 15 years working in agriculture, including a consultancy stint at McKinsey, it made sense to “come full circle and be a future farmer”.
To do so, she joined forces with Gabor Forgacs, a pioneer of cultivated meat. He co-founded Modern Meadow, one of the earliest players in the space, showcasing a prototype of a cultivated sausage at TEDMED 2011, a whole two years earlier than Dr Mark Post’s world-famous burger.
Modern Meadow “really sparked people’s imagination and showed it was possible to build meat from cells”, says Gupta. Cost barriers led Forgacs and his team to pivot to cultivated leather at the time, and today, the company makes cow-hide alternatives out of plant proteins and upcycled post-consumer tyres. Forgacs left the firm in 2016, and co-founded Fork & Good with Gupta two years later.
“We are working together to invent a much more practical, cost-based approach informed by my experience in the food industry and using his expertise in the fields of tissue engineering and biophysics,” she says.
“We need all the solutions possible to keep having safe, affordable meat and if we [want to] have any chance of meeting our 1.5°C global warming target. Cultivated meat builds a more resilient supply chain and helps us do it sustainably.”
How Fork & Good makes its cultivated pork
Courtesy: Fork & Good
Gupta’s agtech background led her to realise that cultivated meat is a lot like hydroponic farming, where you “optimise input for output” – that is, you grow vegetables in nutrient-rich water instead of soil.
“In the same spirit, our process is based on the mutual optimisation of the three input components – the cell line, the medium and the bioprocess – to grow animal cells (i.e. the biomass) more efficiently than livestock,” she explains.
“Specifically, we developed immortal cell lines and corresponding medium with an iterative approach by analysing the waste medium and determining what the cells use (for example, which amino acids and in what concentration). We adopted a bioreactor technology that assures the best control over the way our adherent cells grow in aggregates – we can control the size of the aggregates – to maximise cell density,” she adds.
This approach reduces the calorie intensity of feedstock fourfold for pork and fivefold for beef, making Fork & Good confident it can “grow meat with fewer resources than animals”.
The optimisation through the three components forms the base of its patented integrated cell manufacturing (ICM) platform, which lets it grow a large number of cells in a cost-effective manner. In addition, the company has an optimised downstream process and continuous harvesting process at its pilot facility in Jersey City, which can produce about seven tonnes of product in less than 800 sq ft of space.
“The ICM, combined with our continuous downstream processing and the fact that we are not using stem cells – instead, [we] are editing muscle cells to skip the cost and complexity of differentiation – substantially differentiates Fork & Good from others,” says Gupta.
“Furthermore, unlike many companies focused entirely on the biology, we are also addressing capital expenditure by having low-cost distributed manufacturing, made possible via designed-for-purpose bioreactors and continuous harvesting,” she adds.
“In particular, this allows us to build much smaller facilities (10×1000 litres) to scale up production to commercially relevant quantities of biomass – $10-20M for a single facility rather than hundreds of millions.”
Fork & Good’s target pricing is $2 per lb, which would match commodity pork, and in-house R&D data supports this goal. But the bulk of this work comes during scale-up and engineering. “In our first scale-up factory, we’re targeting $5 per lb for 100% biomass with our more tried and tested cell line, which would be possible at commercial scale today. This is based on existing observed yields, media costs and purchasing components at scale,” Gupta says.
US regulatory plans hinge on RFK Jr
Courtesy: Fork & Good
The startup’s initial geographic priorities are North America and Southeast Asia. “We have been working with the FDA and USDA for two years, and are applying to Singapore as well,” says Gupta.
The latter was the first country to allow the sale of cultivated meat back in 2020, and authorised Australia’s Vow to sell cultured quail and foie gras too last year. “Some of our partners in other Asian countries are keeping us informed of the latest regulatory developments for us to be opportunistic there,” she says.
In the US, only Eat Just and Upside Foods have been cleared to sell cultivated meat so far, and with Robert F Kennedy Jr sworn in as the new health secretary, uncertainty looms for how this sector is regulated.
“We believe the biggest relevant challenge in the US is the uncertainty facing all government agencies at this moment,” says Gupta. “If the FDA has fewer resources or is reorganised, this will impact their bandwidth for review and lengthen processing times. Diversifying geographic focus is a good idea to mitigate regulatory risk.”
Fork & Good has been vocal about this – before Florida finalised its ban on cultivated meat last summer, its head of business opportunities, Emily Bogan, told a House panel in February: “A ban like this threatens a free market and sets a dangerous precedent for government interference.”
If all goes well, though, looking at past approvals, Gupta envisions Q2 2026 as the earliest launch date for its cultivated pork.
‘Nothing is inevitable’ – including cultivated meat
Courtesy: Fork & Good
Fork & Good has so far attracted $30M from investors including True Ventures, Starlight Ventures, BBG Ventures, and Leaps, the VC arm of German pharmaceutical giant Bayer. “We closed a Series A2 round October last year, to fund our response to FDA feedback and deliver on customer deals we had signed,” notes Gupta. “We have $1-2M open for this same round closing at the end of Q1.”
Cultivated meat has been a victim of the food tech investor fallout, with companies in the category raising 40% less money last year than they did in 2023. Worryingly, they only secured $6M in the second half of last year.
“The funding landscape has definitely changed due to the burst of the hype bubble combined with macro forces in VC. Our last round was the most challenging of the three institutional rounds we have raised. Luckily, as we have stayed capital-efficient and have had reasonable valuations, [we] were less impacted than others,” Gupta explains.
“If startups rode the wave, they should be taking a hard look at their business and resetting expectations. [They should also be] adopting leaner approaches and looking at alternative forms of capital – particularly from funders who value our solutions. This is still a really huge problem to solve, and supply chain pressures and meat prices are higher than ever,” she adds.
Gupta warns that “nothing is inevitable except for death and taxes”, and this applies to cultivated meat too. “Unlike pure software innovation, outside of the breakthrough, you need to solve for infrastructure, supply chains, consumer education and safety/regulation,” she states.
“This is true of any major zero-to-one innovation, especially in a climate where we have to touch the physical world. But when the need is great enough, you see multiple waves of innovation in the same area until the problem is solved – e.g., solar energy took several attempts over the years, before costs fell faster than any expert or academic predicted.”
The company has ridden that wave Gupta spoke of – can it now make good on its promise to put cultivated pork on your fork?
New York-based Blackbird Foods has been acquired by Ahimsa Companies, a holding company with several sustainable protein startups in its roster.
Frozen plant-based food maker Blackbird Foods has been acquired by Ahimsa Companies, an investor on a takeover spree of alternative protein players globally.
The deal will help Blackbird Foods – which makes vegan pizzas and wings, seitan, and dairy-free cheese – expand its reach, enhance its manufacturing capabilities, and accelerate product innovation.
It is Ahimsa Companies’s third M&A deal since being founded last year, after its acquisitions of leading brand Wicked Kitchen (including subsidiaries Good Catch and Current Foods) in May 2024, and nugget maker Simulate last October.
Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but Blackbird Foods will continue to operate under its existing brand identity.
Courtesy: Blackbird Foods
Banking on the market for frozen vegan food
Blackbird Foods, founded in 2022 by Emanuel Storch and Mike Pease, has products in Target, Whole Foods Market, Sprouts Farmers Market, and The Fresh Market, as well as restaurants like Screamer’s Pizzeria.
One of its flagship products is the pepperoni pizza, which it recently revamped with the help of industry giant Beyond Meat. The startup swapped its housemade pepperoni with the latter’s pea protein version, which it said was meatier.
In 2024, it raised $125,000 in a crowdfunding round on StartEngine, where it claimed to have recorded lifetime sales of over $11M. According to a filing with the SEC, the business made $4.47M in revenue in 2023, a 60% increase from the year before, which it attributed to increased distribution and velocity.
“We are eager to tap into Ahimsa’s extensive knowledge to strengthen Blackbird’s presence in the frozen aisle. With their support, we have ambitious plans for growth and exciting product innovations on the horizon,” said Pease.
While retail sales of plant-based meat suffered in 2024, they sold much better in the freezer than the fridge, according to market research firm Circana. Dollar sales of chilled meat analogues took a 17% dip in the 52 weeks to July 14, 2024 to reach $309M, while those in the frozen aisle only encountered a 6% loss, totalling $720M in sales.
Courtesy: Blackbird Foods
Ahimsa Companies leads plant-based consolidation era
Backed by investors including the Ahimsa Foundation, Ahimsa Companies’s business model involves taking over companies that can reshape the sustainable food industry. The holding company has noted that consolidation is “critical to the growth and success”.
As part of a roll-up strategy, Ahimsa Companies is looking at companies in the precision fermentation, cultivated meat, extruded pea protein, non-dairy alternative, and plant-based food segments, and has bought a 50,000 sq ft factory in Ohio to produce meat analogues.
“Ahimsa Companies shares our passion for plant-based innovation and animal-free food production. Together, we will continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible in plant-based cuisine while maintaining the quality and authenticity our customers love,” said Storch.
Courtesy: Simulate/Green Queen
The acquisition comes after investment in plant-based startups fell by 75% in 2024, reflecting an overall hesitance in food tech funding among venture capitalists. It has played a part in the string of consolidation deals the sector has seen recently – in the UK alone, food and drink M&A activity was up by 29% in 2024.
Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick says soaring egg prices have driven up demand for its mung-bean-derived Just Egg, with sales hikes unlike what the firm has seen in the past.
Eggs have never been more expensive in the US. According to consumer price index data released by the USDA last weekend, average retail Grade A egg prices reached $4.95 per dozen last month, surpassing the previous high recorded in January 2023.
The new record came just as 23 million birds were culled in January due to this latest wave of avian flu (taking the total to nearly 160 million since February 2022). “It’s the most serious bird flu crisis in history,” says Josh Tetrick. “It’s spreading faster than ever before.”
Courtesy: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Tetrick is the co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, the company behind Just Egg that is very much meeting the moment. “Egg shelves are empty, except for one product, and it happens to be made from plants,” he tells Green Queen on a phone call. “It’s both an extraordinary and strange moment.”
This is because millions of Americans are being exposed to a vegan egg for the very first time, he says, and his company takes up 99% of that market. “If they want eggs, they [only] have a few choices,” notes Tetrick. “One, don’t eat them. Two, you know, have applesauce. Or three, have Just Egg.”
In January alone, Just Egg’s sales grew five times faster than in the past year, while 56% of shoppers have returned to buy more (a three-point increase from 2024). At one of the country’s largest retailers, its sales are up by 70% compared to the same week last year.
The plant-based company makes a refrigerated liquid alternative, a frozen omelette-style folded product and a just-relaunched mayonnaise range.
Courtesy: Just Egg
“We have some of the largest chains in the country reaching out to us – on the foodservice side, the convenience store side – saying they don’t know when this is going to end, and they want to bring in something that’s more reliable and more permanent, i.e., what we’re doing,” says Tetrick.
Restaurants are feeling the pinch, too. Popular breakfast chain Waffle House has introduced a temporary 50-cent surcharge per egg, and some bakeries are switching to vegan eggs. One local cafe in Philadelphia – 90% of whose menu depends on eggs – told the Guardian that a plate of bacon, eggs and toast with coffee now costs twice as much as it did last year.
This, Tetrick feels, is a moment for the sustainable protein sector – to show that there’s a different, safer, healthier and more reliable way to produce eggs than farming birds in concentrated feeding operations: “This is a real moment in time for the plant-based industry to prove that it’s up to the challenge.”
Eat Just offering free cases to restaurants and retailers
Courtesy: Eat Just
Eat Just is witnessing greater demand across retail and foodservice, including local diners and cafés, mom-and-pop stores, and caterers that supply to universities (like Sodexo). “People are wanting to order more because consumers are going through the product faster because there are fewer options – i.e. chicken eggs – available,” says Tetrick.
Currently, more than 70% of its sales come from the retail channel, with the pourable liquid format its most popular product (followed by the foldable egg patty).
To expand its uptake, though, Tetrick says Eat Just is incentivising restaurants and retailers by providing them with a free case of Just Egg and other discounts. This helps them bring the product in for the first time and ensure they have a supply of eggs, which they struggle to do “when they’re only relying on chickens”.
While it’s hard to find eggs on supermarket shelves right now, Just Egg is available in over 40,000 stores today. “Almost every major retailer carries Just Egg. But we do have gaps, and we expect to fill more of those gaps in the next few months,” he says.
Courtesy: Eat Just
The firm’s manufacturing facility in western Minnesota has enough capacity to double its production if needed – though it’ll need to be expanded if it needs to produce more than that. “Then we have partner facilities that we work with. We send the protein, and they have plenty of capacity also,” says Tetrick.
He adds: “We are scheduling more days of production. We’re ordering more materials, like packaging, ahead of time to ensure that we’re prepared for even more orders than we might even anticipate.”
Tetrick says that Just Egg is cheaper than chicken eggs in some parts of the country (its 16oz liquid egg carton, equivalent to about 10 eggs, retails for US$7.36 at Walmart) right now. In some places, consumers and restaurants are paying up to $7 per dozen for the latter, while wholesale prices of white-shell eggs now stand at $8 per dozen.
Recently published research suggests that undercutting the cost of animal proteins is the most effective purchase driver for plant-based food, so Eat Just needs to find a way to continue to lower costs and stay cheaper beyond the current egg price hike caused by supply shortages.
Tetrick says the company is working on it. To make its egg alternatives, Eat Just separates protein from mung beans, a process responsible for roughly half of the cost of production. “The more efficiently we can [do that], the lower our cost is,” Tetrick explains. “So we’re devising more and more processes to reduce the cost of protein, using techniques to yield up and having a higher throughput.”
Chicken egg makers stuck in a cycle
Courtesy: Eat Just
Nearly all Americans (94% of them) eat eggs. It’s by far the most widely consumed animal protein in the country. “I don’t remember a time in the United States when a major animal protein is literally not on shelves anymore, in many of the biggest grocery stores,” Tetrick points out. “People have a hard time finding it.”
It’s not the first big wave of bird flu to hit the US egg industry in recent years. And when prices skyrocketed last time, they returned to normal levels in the months that followed. However, this wave appears worse.
This time, the avian flu is “objectively” bigger, in terms of the number of birds affected, and the impact on egg prices and the supply chain. Tetrick believes this is happening because of the “inherent nature of the system”.
Courtesy: Eat Just
“To make eggs for a country of 350 million people, it means one very basic thing: you have to pack lots of animals in small spaces. And when you do that, because basic biology is a thing, those animals will just get sick, and that’s going to keep happening,” he says.
“The industry can’t get out of that cycle. Move them closer. They get sick. Then there’s avian flu, and then you’ve got to kill lots of them. And then the egg shelves are empty. And here we go again,” he adds. “More and more retailers are realising that that is a fact, and they’re beginning to think through what the world will look like when that continues to happen.”
In Tetrick’s ideal world, you’ll have more pasture-raised eggs at higher prices, and a greater number of plant-based alternatives.
He acknowledges that the current reality is far from his vision. “It’s quite different from what the egg shelves look like today, though,” he says.
An inflection point for the plant-based industry
Courtesy: Eat Just
To date, Eat Just has raised over $850M in venture capital, with existing investor VegInvest/Ahimsa Foundation pouring in $16M in the last publicly announced investment in 2023. At the time, there were suggestions that the company was facing a cash squeeze.
But Tetrick confirms that the company has healthy cash flow and isn’t looking to fundraise at the moment: “We sell every Just Egg product at a positive margin, and it’s able to support the key functions of the company, so it can continue to grow faster.”
Chicken-free eggs made up just 0.5% of the plant-based retail market in the US in 2023, having been bought by just 1% of households. However, with bird flu and soaring chicken egg prices, the category is set to expand faster now.
According to Tetrick, Eat Just is the 17th largest egg company in the US today: “And we’re growing everywhere – retail, foodservice, everything.”
Courtesy: Box Clever/Eat Just
This is a moment for the sustainable protein sector to prove itself. “We have to prove that we can be in stock. We have to prove that we can make a nice omelette. We have to prove that we can continue to do it consistently,” he says. “And if we do that, we think this could be a real inflection point where millions of people move from a conventional egg to something that we think is a lot better. And it’s a broader statement about what plant-based can be.”
Just Egg makes up “99.999% of our sales”, says Tetrick – the rest comes from its cultivated meat arm, Good Meat. “We are the reliable egg today, and we cannot let this moment pass,” he says. “We’ve got to deliver on time, and in full. We’ve got to make sure that we’re making sufficient product. We need to make sure that if there’s any out-of-stocks around the country that we even hear of anecdotally, we’re on top of it, within hours.
“When we look back 20 years from now, I think it’ll be one of the most important moments in the plant-based industry. And I hope we meet it.”
Magic Valley, a Melbourne-based producer of cultivated meat, has received A$100,000 in government funding to scale up production and drive down costs.
Aussie food tech startup Magic Valley has secured A$100,000 ($62,800) from the national government to transition from research to commercial production of cultivated meat.
The grant is part of the A$392M Industry Growth Program (IGP), which aligns with the government’s National Reconstruction Fund priorities, including agricultural value-adding and low-emissions technologies.
The investment will help Magic Valley, which specialises in cultivated pork and lamb, accelerate production, optimise bioprocessing, and drive down costs, which it says are key steps on its path to market.
How Magic Valley makes its cultivated meat
Courtesy: Magic Valley
Founded in 2020 by CEO Paul Bevan, Magic Valley unveiled a cultivated lamb product in 2022, targeting one of the most polluting products in the food system (it ranks only behind beef and dark chocolate). It then ventured into cultivated pork with a minced product, which the startup has indicated it can produce for A$8 per kg.
Magic Valley’s technology doesn’t require fetal bovine serum, and taps into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). It takes a small sample of skin cells from a living animal, which are expanded and turned into iPSCs, which in turn can be converted into muscle and fat.
The cells are grown in a bioreactor, in a mixture of water, amino acids, and other nutrients. They’re harvested after a few weeks and turned into meat products. These can be made over and over again from the original cell sample, since the iPSCs can grow in an unlimited way.
According to the company, its process can reduce its proteins’ emissions by 92%, land use by 95%, and water use by 78% compared to their conventional counterparts.
In 2023, it collaborated with Washington-based Biocellion SPC to enhance its bioreactor design and optimise production, and expanded into a new pilot facility at bio-innovator and incubator Co-Labs. This plant can house bioreactors with a capacity of up to 3,000 litres, allowing it to potentially produce 150,000 kgs of cultivated meat annually.
Courtesy: Magic Valley
Magic Valley hosted a public tasting for its cultivated pork in April, serving it as part of baos at John Gorilla Café in Brunswick, Victoria. It has also hosted a televised tasting on Australia’s Channel 7 network, and appeared on Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars Australia.
It was one of five startups to receive the latest round of grants under the IGP, which supports small and medium-sized businesses that play a crucial role in the economy but can find it difficult to come to market. The scheme focuses on several verticals, from renewables and medical science to defence and agriculture.
IGP supports enterprises in commercialising their ideas, growing their operations, expanding to national and international markets, and better positioning themselves to secure future investment and scaling opportunities.
Courtesy: Magic Valley
“This funding turbocharges our ability to scale. We’re not just making meat – we’re creating the future of food. And this support from the Australian government signals that they believe in that future too,” said Bevan.
It comes at a time when more and more Australians are cutting back on meat, with 42% now either reducing or not consuming animal protein at all. Last year alone, a quarter had lowered their meat intake, and another 14% were planning to do so too.
However, a 2023 survey of Australians and New Zealanders found that 74% weren’t familiar with cultivated meat, while only 24% would readily incorporate it into their diets (and 48% said they wouldn’t do so). Research also shows that when it comes to alternative protein policies, Australia ranks bottom on the list of the 10 most supportive governments in Asia-Pacific. So investments like the one in Magic Valley are a welcome step.
Courtesy: Food Frontier
While Cass Materials, Infinite Bioworks, and Smart MCs are all developing products and services to help manufacturers make cultivated meat, the only two companies actively producing these proteins are Magic Valley and Vow.
The latter is already selling its cultivated quail and foie gras in Singapore and Hong Kong, and is awaiting approval from Food Standards Australia New Zealand. Magic Valley has indicated that it was working closely with the regulator on the compliance and safety of its cultivated pork, and previously suggested that it could commercially launch the product this year.
British vegan entrepreneur Heather Mills, founder of legacy brand VBites, on what’s going wrong for the plant-based industry – and how it can move forward.
Having spent decades in the vegan food sector and collaborating with a small group of like-minded individuals to raise awareness about the urgent need to protect animals, the planet, and our health, we were delighted to witness the tremendous growth in this movement over the past five years.
We would like to take credit for it – and we definitely should, as far as making the best products are concerned at VBites.
However, the real reason for the growth was the sale of three vegan/vegetarian food companies for hundreds of millions of dollars: Quorn, Daiya, and then the IPO of Beyond Meat (which took its market cap to $12B at one point).
At the time, I warned these companies that they should have their messaging ready for the pushback from the meat and dairy industry. Unfortunately, they didn’t listen and that huge $12B valuation dropped to under $500M for Beyond Meat.
The meat and dairy industry became afraid because they did not have ownership and control of the vegan market and the boom, and put out dreadful products that turned people off going vegan.
Investor interest must be retained
Courtesy: VBites
In the UK, at VBites, we thought about this and got ahead of the game by replicating famous brands and manufacturing vegan alternates for them, such as Applewood vegan cheese, Domino’s pizza cheese, and numerous other supermarket labels of meat- and fish-free products.
Had these companies that obtained hundreds of millions of dollars focused on working with meat and dairy companies to replicate their brands as white labels, as well as their own brand, the Gartner effect may not have happened.
That’s why we created the first vegan burgers and cheese for McDonald’s and Burger King.
Going forward, there is no other choice than to push the reduction of global warming, the cruelty of animals, and the improvement of health by going vegan.
The most important thing is that greedy corporate investors stay invested in these companies for the long term, for the future of their own children, the planet, and the animals.
It’s not just the profit – the sector will become very profitable – however, it needs time and investment, and it needs to be well spent. I find the big corporations waste so much money and that’s attributed to this downfall.
It’s all about the people
Courtesy: Diana Papini
Vegan startups mainly started with enthusiastic founders like myself. I had 30 years’ experience and made the same mistakes. However, I never had a huge investment.
A lot of these founders also were really knowledgeable in tech and brand marketing, but did not think of the bigger picture or understand how difficult it is to scale up kitchen products into large-scale, manufacturing products.
That requires a totally different expertise.
At the time, I contacted them and said: “Let us do the manufacturing for you, as we have the world’s largest 100% vegan manufacturing facilities and have been the experts for decades.”
They had no original IP and we suggested they get on with the genius of branding, but unfortunately, they ignored this and most of them went into administration.
We at VBites went through a similar situation when we were invested in, because the investors thought they knew what they were doing and didn’t listen to how to run a small family business. Bottom line, it’s all about the people.
We have our online supermarket called Alternative Stores, which is growing 55% per month. We have 2,200 products, including the most innovative boiled, fried and poached vegan eggs. We’ve also created an egg albumen to go into food application.
To help the smaller family businesses that have been used for their innovations, then copied, private-labelled and dumped out of the supermarkets, we don’t charge for these brands to put their products on our website. This way, they can test the market without mortgaging their house and putting themselves into debt.
We have turned our companies around by working directly on the factory floor with the people who have been with us for many decades. The problem with big corporates is that they sit in their ivory towers and most of them have never run a business from the ground up, so they need to listen to the founders.
And if the founders are not experienced, they need to listen to the financial expertise of those who know what they’re doing.
I believe that there will be another plant-based boom because there has to be. There is no other option.
Months after securing an exit for Deliciously Ella, founders Ella and Matthew Mills have acquired vegan ready meal leader Allplants out of administration under their revamped Plants brand.
Less than three months after it entered administration, British ready meal startup Allplants is back on the market, having been rescued by the founders of fellow vegan business Deliciously Ella in their bid to drive the conversation away from “ultra-processed meat alternatives”.
Ella and Matthew Mills, who sold Deliciously Ella to Hero Group in September, retained their Plants brand and restaurant in the multimillion-pound deal. While the Plants by DE eatery has since closed, the CPG label – launched as a sub-brand with Waitrose in 2022 – is now undergoing a refresh with the acquisition of Allplants.
“We are absolutely thrilled to share that today we have acquired the Allplants brand name and associated brand assets out of administration,” Ella Mills said in a statement. “We will bring together Plants and all plants to create something truly special – a new, natural, plant-based powerhouse.”
Instead of launching new products under the Allplants label, Plants will look to leverage the former’s social media following – it has nearly 200,000 followers across its accounts – to expand its reach.
The refreshed business will be led by managing director Kerry Atack, who has worked with Deliciously Ella since 2020.
Deliciously Ella founders tap into Allplants’s ‘enormous promise’
Courtesy: Plants
Set up by brothers Alex and Jonathan Petrides, Allplants has been around since 2016, selling vegan ready meals online and via retailers. It capitalised on the meal delivery boom a few years later during the pandemic-induced lockdowns, and when it made its retail debut in November 2022, it sold six million meals within the first three months.
Over the years, the company raised £67M from investors including professional footballers Chris Smalling and Kieran Gibbs. But in the background, it registered losses of nearly £10M in the seven months to March 2023, which Jonathan ascribed to inflation, post-Brexit supply chain disruptions, rising interest rate, and the shift from the growth stage to the pursuit of profitability.
The business went into administration in November, making 65 employees redundant and working with Interpath to find a buyer. Now, it has become the latest in a line of plant-based companies that have been rescued from the brink, including Meatless Farm, VBites, Plant & Bean, and Mycorena.
Courtesy: Allplants
“When we started cooking in 2016, fewer than 1% of Brits ate vegan. Today, that number is over 6%, with millions more flexing and shifting towards plant-based,” said Jonathan, who has left the business. “Allplants was always about sparking that curiosity, nudging habits, and helping people taste the future.”
He added: “Putting so much goodness out into the world and being a part of this societal shift is something we can always be very proud of, and I feel privileged to have been involved in such an important movement – but there’s still a lot of progress to hopefully come.”
In her statement, Mills said: “Having spent the past 12 years building Deliciously Ella and Plants, we have long admired the Allplants brand, and the brand name has built remarkable consumer awareness across the UK. Unfortunately, the business ran into significant financial difficulty, and we know that the resulting administration has been an incredibly difficult time for the community, customers, suppliers, team members and investors.”
She added that Plants was “pleased to have signed an agreement” to acquire the brand name and assets: “We’re so excited to build an exciting future for this brand with such enormous promise.”
Ella Mills slams UPFs ahead of Plants brand refresh
Courtesy: Plants/Green Queen
Plants sells pantry staples like pasta, sauces, kombucha, soups, and frozen meals, which are available at Waitrose, Ocado, Whole Foods Market, and Zapp.
The brand will announce a packaging refresh in April, with phrases like “Real food”, “Real flavour”, and “100% natural ingredients” forming part of a new direction that looks to shift the discourse away from ultra-processed foods (UPFs).
These make up 57% of the average British diet, and while experts have warned against associating processing with nutrition, a backlash against UPFs has also led to plant-based meat products falling into disrepute.
Retail sales for plant-based meat were down by 6% in the UK in 2023, with volumes plunging further by 13%, while the country’s largest meat-free company, Quorn, posted pre-tax losses of £63M that year, a fourfold increase from the £15M it lost in 2022, just as more youngsters are increasing their meat intake (19%) than reducing it (16%) in the UK. Vegan ready meals, meanwhile, saw a decline of 20%.
The UPF pushback has given rise to whole foods like beans, tofu (now in 8% of British households, despite being a UPF too), and tempeh (with one tempeh maker the second-fastest growing meat-free brand last year).
Courtesy: Deliciously Ella
“The plant-based category should be synonymous with real, nourishing food, yet for too long it has been dominated by ultra-processed meat alternatives, a trend now in steep decline. We’re here to try and change that, and to reimagine the plant-based fixture with delicious, natural, quick wins for clever cooks,” said Mills.
It’s the latest example of vegan brands themselves attacking plant-based meat for being ultra-processed. Phil Graves, CEO of mycelium meat maker Meati, recently told Green Queen that people shouldn’t have to choose between factory-farmed meat or “ultra-processed plant-based options that have a long list of ingredients you can’t pronounce”.
Consumers are cutting back on meat due to health concerns, but plant-based alternatives fail to meet their taste expectations – a new study says blended proteins could offer a balance.
Flavour, nutrition and affordability have long been thought to be the most influential factors driving food purchases. A new report from Food System Innovations (FSI) suggests that entrenched beliefs, familiarity concerns, and functional expectations are becoming increasingly important and are having an effect on people’s food choices.
The future food non-profit says that while their data shows consumers’ appetite for meat is decreasing due to health concerns, plant-based alternatives are not meeting the moment either – and their acceptance hinges on taste improvements.
FSI’s proposed solution? Blended meat – or, as they say, ‘Balanced Proteins’. The clue’s in the name. These products combine meat with plant-based ingredients, providing a better-for-you and better-for-the-planet solution without “changing the essence of what makes meat so beloved”.
According to a 2,000-person nationally representative survey of US omnivores and flexitarians, FSI conducted with YouGov, a 50:50 blend is the “sweet spot”. Since 37% of Americans prefer products with 1-49% of plant-based ingredients, and a third favour a 51-99% ratio, brands offering 50:50 blends – like the Both Burger, Fable Foods, and the Duo Burger – stand to win.
“This is an intuitive heuristic that people gravitate towards and helps them understand the category,” suggests Tim Dale, category innovation director at FSI.
Balancing health, taste and price concerns
Gen Zers have been labelled as the group spearheading the protein transition. Studies suggest that they are likely to reduce meat consumption based on factors like the environment, and the same goes for millennials.
According to FSI’s data, these two demographics also find the blended meat category more appealing than other age groups – 38% of Gen Z and 34% of millennial Americans were interested in the concept, compared to just 8-21% of the rest.
Courtesy: Food Systems Innovation
That being said, the widespread adoption of balanced proteins – as well as plant-based meat – is faced with a major barrier: taste. Nearly two-thirds of consumers who tried vegan alternatives rated their flavour as ‘okay’, ‘not so good’, or ‘terrible’, no doubt contributing to the 71% of respondents who said they’re unlikely to buy meat-free products in the next six months.
Even with blended meat, 63% said they wouldn’t purchase these products in the ensuing months. Asked why, 38% cited flavour and 29% texture.
At the same time, just over half of Americans who have reduced or intend to reduce their meat intake cite health and price as the biggest reasons. And for people who find blended meat appealing, having it be the same price or cheaper than conventional meat would influence at least 20% of those surveyed to buy these products.
So how do you balance the health and affordability concerns around meat with the taste dissatisfaction with alternatives? Dale proposes splitting the concept of taste into “perceived taste” and “actual taste”.
“Balanced proteins face a challenge with perceived taste, which is currently poor due to factors like familiarity, trust, and the role of meat and plant-based ingredients in consumers’ diets,” he says.
Indeed, 44% of those who find blended meat appealing say they’re “not someone who would eat this”, and cite it as a reason why they wouldn’t buy it for their loved ones.
Courtesy: Food Systems Innovation
“However, the actual taste of several brands has been shown to surpass leading conventional products in categories like burgers and chicken nuggets. This suggests that once consumers try these products, their initial taste scepticism may diminish,” notes Dale.
“Overcoming the perceived taste barrier will take time and will depend on more people trying products that provide new value to the consumer diets and consistently deliver on taste,” he adds.
Choose ‘functionality’ over ‘nutrition’ as processing fears persist
Curiosity drives the demand for blended meat more than factors like health or sustainability, and for Gen Zers, ease of preparation ranks just as high as nutrition on their list of priorities.
Speaking of which, most Americans who are turned off by blended meat aren’t worried about the nutrition aspect (only 18% expressed this concern) – instead, a third are worried about the way these products are manufactured. It’s a nod to the debate around ultra-processed foods, and how plant-based meat has been targeted across the media and criticised as being overly processed, unfairly so according to some.
Courtesy: Food Systems Innovation
“Consumers are particularly concerned about processing in novel meat categories, even though ingredient and processing concerns are less prominent in their overall diet,” says Dale. The fact that this doesn’t impact their nutritional perception of blended meat shows that “while they may dislike the means, they accept the ends”.
He points to the “tension” of trying something new as a reason for the pushback against processing: “Consumers must overcome habitual purchases and anxieties when trying a new product. For balanced proteins to succeed, they need to clearly communicate a compelling benefit that outweighs the perceived risk of change.”
This lack of familiarity and trust gives people “an easy reason to dismiss” novel products, since they look for information that reinforces their preexisting concerns. “To overcome these barriers, balanced proteins should lean into distinct advantages – ideally tied to plant-based ingredient inclusion – that address different consumer pain points,” Dale explains.
“While consumer education and cleaner ingredient strategies can help, the most effective way to move past UPF concerns is by delivering benefits that consumers actively desire. I think Perdue Plus [which uses plant-based ingredients from The Better Meat Co] is a great example – getting children to enjoy eating vegetables.”
Courtesy: Perdue
He notes that many blended meat formats are competing on the same value proposition as conventional meat, which has high consumer ratings for taste and value: “To win in these categories, balanced proteins must far exceed conventional options, not just match them.”
Dale also prefers using “functionality” over terms like “health” or “nutrition”, which may not be effective drivers. “While nutritional benefits matter, brands need to recognise how consumers perceive their conventional meat competition – if they don’t see a problem, nutrition alone won’t drive adoption,” he says.
How can brands tap into the blended meat opportunity?
Overall, only a quarter of respondents to the YouGov poll found blended meat appealing, in stark contrast to the 67% of omnivores who expressed interest in buying these products in a 2024 survey by FSI’s Nectar initiative.
Dale argues that the Nectar study likely setup the increased products’ appeal. People completed the survey immediately after tasting the product and were unaware whether they had eaten a blended or conventional version.
The methodology used in the YouGov poll, however, likely reduced appeal. “The category was described in the abstract rather than with images or real products, which may have limited familiarity,” explains Dale. The wording used to describe blended meat suggested that conventional proteins aren’t widely perceived as needing nutritional improvement and sustainability remains a niche driver.
Regardless, Dale advises brands to find their white space based on consumer needs and desires. “It is easier to solve an existing consumer problem rather than a created one,” he says.
Moreover, these products must be seen as approachable, and finding a balance between familiarity with meat and a differentiated value proposition from plant-based ingredients is crucial too.
Courtesy: Anisha Sisodia/Phil’s Finest
“Don’t let the pursuit of perfect clean labels or niche positioning overshadow the fundamentals – taste, value, familiarity, and functionality,” he says. “Engage consumers early and often to develop a clear, realistic understanding of their taste perceptions and preferences.”
He adds that brands should lean into innovative formats, experimenting with products that break down barriers to improve accessibility and appeal – think smaller pack sizes or family-friendly options for shared meals. Moreover, lowering the barriers to trial is important. “Address key friction points – such as taste scepticism and price sensitivity – to make trying and switching easier for consumers,” says Dale.
He recommends businesses measure the results of marketing campaigns in the long run: “A new category with new benefits requires sustained communication. Prioritise long-term brand building and consumer education to drive lasting adoption.”
Israel’s Finally Foods has announced its first field trial for potatoes containing casein, less than a year after the molecular farming startup launched.
In what it describes as “record time”, AI-driven molecular farming startup Finally Foods will begin its first field trial for potatoes that contain dairy proteins in Israel next week.
The move comes just 10 months after the Israeli firm emerged from stealth, marking a “major milestone” in its path to commercialisation. The field trial, which will last three to four months, will be a validation point of the company’s technology, which essentially modifies potatoes into bioreactors that can produce casein in a sustainable and cost-effective manner.
It will allow the company to assess the yield scalability and protein yield of its potato crops. The trial “transitions our technology from controlled greenhouse conditions to real-world agricultural settings, testing how our casein-producing potatoes perform in open-field environments”, explains Dafna Gabbay, co-founder and CEO of Finally Foods.
“One of the key challenges in molecular farming is the lengthy time-to-market, but Finally Foods is demonstrating that molecular farming can efficiently produce high-value proteins at scale in record time by drastically reducing the trial-and-error time,” she adds.
Molecular farming helping produce multiple casein formulations
Courtesy: Finally Foods
Gabbay established the startup with CTO Basia J Vinocur, who was formerly the VP of R&D at biotech firm Evogene. Finally Foods has an exclusive license for Evogene’s GeneRator AI technology, which it uses to optimise its production process by enabling short R&D cycles, more efficient extractions, and faster commercialisation plans.
Evogene holds around a 40% stake in the company, with the rest of the ownership divided between the co-founders and state-backed investor The Kitchen FoodTech Hub.
Finally Foods chose to use potatoes because they met several efficiency parameters, including high yields and effective protein extraction. The company has designed the potato as an optimised “expression system” that can formulate multiple variations of casein.
“We’re currently expressing multiple formulations of casein in our plants, with a primary focus on developing versatile formulations that can be used across a broad range of dairy applications,” says Gabbay.
Casein is the most common protein found in cow’s milk, making up 80% of its protein content, and is a key emulsifier that prevents water and fat from separating and gives cheese its melty and stretchy attributes.
There are four kinds of casein proteins found in milk, which fold into a spherical structure known as a micelle, where they are suspended in a highly hydrated solution and bound together with minerals like calcium. This is key to casein’s functional attributes, and Gabbay has previously indicated that her team plans to express all four sub-units in one plant.
Courtesy: Finally Foods
The startup is one of several companies working with molecular farming to produce animal proteins, including Moolec, Alpine Bio, Mozza, Miruku, PoLoPo, and Veloz Bio. A market set to double in value by 2029, molecular farming has been identified as a more viable and affordable way to replicate animal proteins than cell cultivation or precision fermentation.
This technology relies upon genetically engineering plants to produce proteins, which can be harvested from leaves or other tissues. This forgoes the need for expensive fermentation tanks, since plants themselves are the natural bioreactors here.
Finally Foods in talks with dairy producers
“This trial is a necessary step toward large-scale protein extraction, paving the way for efficient and cost-effective production at scale,” says Gabbay.
One of the major challenges faced by molecular farming is regulation – companies require approval to both grow genetically modified plants and then sell them for use in human food.
“Field trials are an essential step for regulatory approval, allowing us to gather key agronomic data and validate environmental impact assessments,” she adds.
This field trial follows the completion of a greenhouse gas trial, which confirmed that the potatoes grow and behave like non-transgenic potatoes and showcase no abnormal characteristics. “This is essential for regulatory approvals and to ensure the plant’s viability for large-scale agricultural production,” notes Gabbay.
“Also, the potatoes we harvested from the greenhouse enable us to extract and analyse casein from different lines expressing different formulations. This step is key for optimising protein yield, functionality, and extraction efficiency.”
Courtesy: Finally Foods
Integrating AI into the process has allowed Finally Foods to accelerate development and get high yields of functional casein within potatoes, while keeping costs low. More and more alternative porten companies are leveraging AI, including Shiru which has an AI-powered protein discovery platform; Climax Foods, which employs machine learning to reverse-engineer what makes cheese taste good; and NotCo, whose AI platform matches thousands of plant-based ingredients to find the combinations best suited to replace animal proteins.
Finally Foods is “in ongoing discussions with several dairy companies to start developing applications” with its casein formulations this year. To support its progress, it is currently securing an extension to the pre-seed round it raised last year, and expects to open a seed funding round in the months to come.
“This next phase of funding will support scaling our production, advancing regulatory approvals, and expanding commercial partnerships, as we continue to drive innovation in molecular farming and plant-based casein production,” Gabbay says.
Our weekly column rounds up the latest sustainable food innovation news. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers Beyond Meat’s new products and cookbook, the US’s first corn milk brand, and a cultivated seafood tasting.
New products and launches
Plant-based meat giant Beyond Meat has expanded its steak lineup with Chimichurri and Korean BBQ-Style flavours, which are available at Sprouts Farmers Market. It has also launched a Go Beyond the BUzzer cookbook with the National Basketball Players Association, with recipes from current NBA players like Cade Cunningham, Kyrie Irving and DeAndre Jordan.
Courtesy: Beyond Meat
German alt-seafood startup Koralo is expanding into the US, and looking to partner with clients for its co-fermented microalgae- and mycelium-based Wellness New F!sh fillet and functional food ingredients.
Speaking of seafood, Canadian firm Konscious Foods has partnered with New York-based seafood purveyor Acme Smoked Fish, which will distribute its plant-based smoked salmon to delis, restaurants, bagel shops, and more.
Fellow Canadian food tech player The Cultivated B has launched multi-channel biosensors to monitor the growth and metabolism of cell culture and fermentation processes. The tech combines continuous tracking with AI-enabled real-time analytics to help enhance accuracy and speed.
Also in Canada, Odd Burger has secured a retail listing with Calgary Co-op, making its vegan frozen food lineup available at all 22 locations in Alberta.
Courtesy: Maïzly
Based in one of the US’s major corn producers, Indianapolis startup Maïzly has debuted a category-first corn milk, which it offers in original and chocolate flavours. Free from seed, nut or vegetable oils, it packs 8g of fibre per cup, and is available on its website, Amazon and select retailers.
Sweden’s Veg of Lund has secured a listing for its Dug potato milk product at 150 Carrefour stores in Spain, marking its debut in the country.
In Spain, supermarket chain Eroski, catering company Ausolan, mycelium firm Innomy, and the Leartiker Technology Centre have created desserts and snack bars made from fungal protein as part of the Delifungus project.
Iceland’s ORF Genetics and South Korea’s CellMeathosted a public tasting for cultivated shellfish meat at the Iceland Ocean Cluster, in an event attended by First Gentleman Björn Skúlason and agrifood minister Hanna Katrín Friðriksson.
Courtesy: Solar Foods
Italian algae startup KelpEat has launched high-protein crackers using Solein, the gas protein produced by Finnish firm Solar Foods. It was showcased at the Pitti Taste show in Florence this week.
Company and finance updates
Solar Foods has also reached a step closer to bringing its air-based protein to the EU market, after addressing inquiries from the European Food Safety Authority regarding the scientific opinion on its novel food application.
Courtesy: Heura
Spanish plant-based meat leader Heura has improved its B Corp rating by 18%, now scoring 111 points and securing the top spot for CPG food businesses with a turnover of over €1M.
NoPalm Ingredients, a Dutch producer of fermentation-derived oils and fats from upcycled agricultural sidestreams, has become the first company to scale such ingredients to industrial levels of 120,000 litres.
Israeli food tech startup SuperMeat has teamed up with Argentinian biomanufacturing firm Stämm to expand production of the former’s cultivated meat, which it says can be produced for $11.79 per pound. The partnership is supported by mutual investor Varana Capital.
Courtesy: Dror Varshavski
Canadian plant protein manufacturer Burcon Nutrascience has agreed to acquire a commercial-scale facility in Galesburg, Illinois, and will begin production in the first half of this year.
In the US, YC-backed blended meat startup Choppy (formerly Paul’s Table) has ceased operations nearly three years after it was established.
Californian alt-honey startup MeliBioearned $15,000 after winning Ajinomoto Health & Nutrition‘s NGT3 pitch slam contest for its precision-fermented honey.
Research, policy and awards
MeliBio‘s European vegan honey distribution deal with Narayan Foods is on the backburner, but the business is aiming to become profitable by the end of the year.
Courtesy: Imperial College London
In the UK, the University of Bristol and Imperial College London have voted to support the transition towards plant-based catering menus, joining a host of other institutes in the Plant-Based Universities movement.
Can targeted menu modifications ‘nudge’ people into picking plant-based items in restaurants? A new study by Bryant Research explores this question, based on trials run at Mumbai restaurant Gracias Granny.
South Korea’s Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs has unveiled its 2025 Agri-Food Fund Operation Plan, committing ₩55B ($38M) towards smart agriculture and food tech.
Courtesy: Gander
Food waste app Gander has been nominated for Prince William‘s Earthshot Prize 2025. The app operates in UK, Ireland, Australia and Brazil, and has saved about 40 million items of food from ending up in the trash.
Finally, the Freedom Food Alliance (FFA) has launchedFoodFacts.org, a fact-checking platform powered by an AI chatbot and expert-backed nutritional and health content. Disclaimer: Green Queem Media founder Sonalie Figueiras is an advisor at FFA.
With egg prices returning to sky-high levels in the US, it brings a major opportunity for plant-based and fermentation-derived alternatives. Can these companies capitalise on the moment?
You know things are serious when Waffle House starts upcharging you for every egg.
The all-day breakfast chain serves 272 million eggs every year; it has now added a temporary 50-cent per-egg surcharge on orders due to the bird-flu-induced national shortage.
The current wave of avian flu – in its third year now – killed more than 40 million chickens in the US in 2024, causing major supply problems and subsequently driving up prices. The peak may have been January 2023, when a dozen eggs set you back $4.82 in the supermarket – though current costs are agonisingly close.
The crisis is showing no signs of abatement – the number of chickens affected by the flu per month tripled in December, and increased further last month. That leaves an egg-shaped hole in grocery baskets and restaurant orders.
This is an opportunity made for sustainable egg protein startups, which are making egg alternatives with plant-based ingredients, as well as recombinant egg proteins from fermentation.
The egg market in numbers
Courtesy: CNBC
Retail chicken egg prices in the US reached $4.15 per dozen in December 2024, a 65% hike from 12 months prior, with consumers and restaurants paying up to $7.
Egg prices are projected to rise by another 20% in 2025, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
The cost of eggs wholesale has already reached an all-time high. White shell eggs now cost $8 a dozen, obliterating the previous record of $5.46 in December 2022.
Inventories of shell eggs are roughly 15-16% below the five-year average, as per the USDA.
It’s not just the US – since 2019, egg prices have doubled in South Africa, and grown by 50-90% in Europe, Russia, Japan, India and Brazil.
In Australia, 1.8 million hens were culled last year as a result of the country’s largest avian flu outbreak. While that was eradicated, a new strain of the virus has appeared.
Courtesy: GFI
Plant-based eggs are a nascent market, making up just 0.5% of retail sales of vegan food in 2023. This amounted to $43M in dollar sales, a 5% decrease from 2022. Unit sales also dropped by 13%.
In the longer term, retail sales of plant-based eggs grew by 11% between 2021 and 2023, and unit sales were up by 8%. In comparison, unit sales of conventional eggs fell by 4% in this period.
Only 1% of US households buy vegan eggs; repeat rates have continued to increase, from 38% in 2020 to nearly half (48%) in 2023.
Courtesy: GFI
While the price gap between chicken-free and conventional eggs shrunk in 2022, a slight stabilisation in the latter’s supply widened it in 2023, with plant-based eggs costing over $8 higher per dozen. This disparity is set to narrow again as avian flu rages on.
One research firm suggests that in Europe, the plant-based egg market is expected to grow by 40% annually to reach $3.88B in 2031, showcasing the potential for these products.
In Asia, this market is set to expand even faster (73% annually) to reach $850M in 2028, led by China and India.
Courtesy: Data Bridge Market Research
The problem: Why egg prices are high
A long-running flu: At the root of the issue is H5N1, the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza that has led to the culling of nearly 158 million birds since 2022. This wave has been ongoing for much longer than usual – in the past, bird flu waves have only lasted for a season or so. Meanwhile, high animal feed prices (initially originating from Russia’s war on Ukraine) have contributed too.
Refreshing flocks is not a quick process: More than 1,550 commercial and backyard flocks have been affected by H5N1 in the last three years. Disinfecting and verifying the safety of a farm can be a lengthy process – and even when it’s deemed safe, it takes a new flock up to 16 weeks to start laying eggs.
Logistical challenges: The egg supply chain has not been spared by the logistical crises that have hit the global food industry. Transportation costs – especially for refrigerated items – have soared amid a shortage of truck drivers in the US and a hike in long-haul truck rates.
Courtesy: Getty Images via Canva
Cage-free policies: Almost a dozen states in the US – including California, Massachusetts, Arizona, and Washington – have introduced cage-free egg policies. Such anti-cruelty legislation sets minimum space requirements for hens, which reduces producers’ overall capacity.
Political pressure: Eggs have been a talking point in the US political sphere over the last year, with President Donald Trump criticising former President Joe Biden’s administration for failing to control the price hikes and promising to get them back to normal when he took over – in actuality, things have only gotten worse since the start of his second term.
Low supply, high demand: While supply has dwindled, Americans’ demand for protein-packed foods like eggs has increased. These consumers are increasingly swapping red meat for poultry and eggs, and 71% have named protein as the macronutrient they’re most interested in consuming.
What are chicken-free egg makers trying to solve?
Direct swaps for classics
Several startups offer liquid eggs or ready-to-eat versions of classic egg dishes that can be used as a 1:1 swap, and these tend to target CPG consumers who use eggs as part of their meals at home.
Perhaps the largest name is Eat Just, whose Just Egg comes in pourable and toaster formats and uses mung bean as a base – it can be used to make scrambles, omelettes and even baked goods, though it does come with a steep price tag.
As of late 2023, Eat Just indicated that its egg alternative captured 99% of the US vegan egg market and that by February 2024 it had sold the equivalent of half a billion eggs. The startup faces competition from brands like Zero Egg and Simply Eggless in the US, and international players such as Crack’d, Oggs, Perfeggt and Vegge.
Courtesy: Eat Just
Others, meanwhile, are moving past pourable formats to offer more novel options. Yo Egg, for example, makes vegan sunny-side-up and poached eggs with runny yolks, which can be boiled or fried. BeLeaf also makes hen-free fried eggs. And under it WunderEggs brand, Crafty Counter turns almonds and cashews into egg patties, boiled eggs, and deviled eggs.
In Singapore, Float Foods has developed a range of plant-based eggs for different applications, including poached, yolks, and XL omelette wraps, under its OnlyEg brand. Poached eggs are also a feature of Germany’s Neggst, as are sunny-side-ups, boiled eggs, and patties.
Courtesy: Le Papondu
French brand Le Papondu, meanwhile, is looking to take things a step further. While it has gone to market with egg patties, it’s working on a crackable whole egg in the background.
A bang for your buck
Most of these pre-prepared or pourable egg alternatives don’t actually undercut the cost of eggs, contributing to the price gap between plant-based and conventional versions. This is where powdered alternatives come in.
It’s the original egg substitute format and it continues to enjoy popularity, as illustrated by the number of brands in this space. As dried products that shoppers add water to, they are much more wallet-friendly, they can be packaged more minimally and they don’t require refrigerated transportation.
Courtesy: Acremade
Powdered vegan eggs are an ideal alternative for cash-strapped consumers in the egg-flation era. Brands like Peggs, Acremade, Orgran, Bob’s Red Mill, Vegg, and Sol Natural are filling this gap.
Like-for-like functionality
Some companies are targeting the bakery and CPG sectors with alternatives that perform like eggs in different products—estimates suggest that up to 40% of all eggs are used as ingredients in foodservice and food manufacturing.
For example, Follow Your Heart, Fabalish, and Eat Just all make egg-free, plant-based mayonnaise, and companies like Orgran, Oggs, and Egg’n’Up all offer substitutes for use in baked goods.
Courtesy: Eat Just
Others, including Revyve and ProteinDistillery, are using waste ingredients like spent brewer’s yeast – a byproduct of the beer industry – as fermentation feedstocks for microbes to produce egg protein alternatives for use in baked goods and meat analogues.
Meanwhile, some startups are using precision fermentation to make bio-identical versions of egg proteins without chickens. The Every Company makes EggWhite (which contains an ovalbumin equivalent), a transparent glycoprotein, and a whole egg; the startup has been granted three ‘no further questions’ letters from the FDA in the US and has applied for regulatory approval in the UK and the EU as well.
Finland’s Onego Bio is using the same technology to produce its recombinant ovalbumin, Bioalbumen, and is awaiting FDA approval this year.
Courtesy: Onego Bio
Belgium’s Otro is also working on egg white proteins made via precision fermentation. And Germany’s Formo is set to launch a precision-fermented egg alternative (though their version isn’t bioidentical). Elsewhere, Israeli startups PoLoPo and Finally Foods are growing egg proteins inside potatoes via molecular farming.
While it’s still early days for many of these startups, there is a clear opportunity amidst what looks like continued supply, quality and price volatility for the global chicken-egg industry.
The number of Europeans who say they eat sustainably has dropped to 46%, despite calls for the bloc’s citizens to cut back on meat and dairy.
Over the last year, several countries in Europe have revised their national dietary guidelines to recommend people eat more plants and fewer animals. This, policymakers have noted, is crucial to safeguard both public and planetary health.
But that advice seems to be falling on deaf ears if a 19,500-person survey of consumers in 18 European countries (including the UK) is anything to go by.
The EIT Food Consumer Observatory’s annual Food Trust Report – backed by the EU – finds that people are prioritising health over sustainability in their food choices, and that too by a considerable margin.
When asked what they’d like to change most about their diets, more than half (51%) of Europeans said they wanted to eat healthier food, while 12% were looking for more affordable options.
Less than one in 10 (9%) of respondents said they wanted to prioritise sustainability, a concerning finding for a demographic that has tended to be more climate-literate than their counterparts in the US or Asia.
“While we can see a desire by consumers to eat more healthily, we’re not seeing the same desire to prioritise sustainability through dietary changes. But linked to this, we’re also seeing consumers struggle with gauging reliability of information about food,” said Sofia Kuhn, director of public insights and engagement at EIT Food. “How can we expect consumers to change their behaviour if they can’t access the information they need to do so?”
Less than one in five Europeans is avoiding meat or dairy
Europeans eat twice as much meat as the global average and what’s recommended by Eat Lancet’s Planetary Health Diet. However, 63% of them are satisfied with their current diets, and only 15% would like to make changes to the way they eat.
Of those who are unsatisfied, 65% mention healthier diets as the priority improvement, and just 5% point to sustainability. However, the importance of the latter increases importance among those happy with their current eating patterns, 12% of whom call it a priority.
“This means that consumers first want to maximise the healthiness of their diets and pay attention to the planetary impact of their diet when they are satisfied with the healthiness,” the report notes.
But the intention to live sustainably has been on the decline since 2020, when 78% of Europeans said they wanted to be more eco-friendly, compared to 70% today – this is despite climate change wreaking havoc on the continent and killing 45,000 people annually.
This translates to diet too. The share of Europeans who say they eat sustainably has reduced from 51% in 2020 to 46% in 2024. And despite meat and dairy being highly polluting foods – they account for 84% of EU agricultural emissions, despite providing only 35% of its calories – less than one in five (18%) say they avoid animal products.
In contrast, 40% of respondents say they actively avoid processed foods, highlighting the conundrum faced by plant-based meat makers. Seasonal and local eating are the major dietary considerations when it comes to sustainability, though just 30% try to eat foods with the “least impact on the environment”.
Knowledge gap key to sustainability interest
Over half of Europeans would like to increase their intake of fruits and vegetables, in line with dietary recommendations. That said even though they’re overconsuming protein, 30% would like to eat more of this macronutrient. In contrast, only 38% want to increase fibre consumption, despite most Europeans being fibre-deficient.
In terms of future dietary changes, about 60% of survey respondents say they’d like to avoid processed foods, but only a quarter say the same for animal-based foods. In fact, 12% would like to increase their intake of meat and dairy, leaving the net percentage of people who want to eat more plant-forward at 13%.
“Despite the fact that this is probably the most sustainable behaviour on the list and the attention given to this change in diets, very few consumers are planning to shift their intake of animal-based products to more plant-based options,” the report found.
Going forward, 44% of Europeans would like to decrease the environmental impact of their diets, an improvement on current trends. In a blow to regenerative agriculture, only 26% of people want to eat more foods grown this way.
One reason for the low interest in planet-friendly eating could be a knowledge gap. Only 46% of Europeans feel they have enough knowledge about the sustainability of food, and just 41% can determine just how eco-friendly a food is.
This is directly linked with trust in the food chain – those who trust various food system actors feel more knowledgeable about sustainability. The problem EIT’s research has uncovered is that not enough people have faith in the food chain. Only around a quarter of Europeans trust retailers and regulatory authorities on sustainability, and even the most trusted actors – farmers – fall short here.
Lack of support for cultivated meat and animal-free dairy
One way to improve the European diet is through food innovation. However, consumer enthusiasm for this has already been low and dropped from 34% in 2023 to 28% last year. This is also associated with trust in the food system – 38% of those who have faith in the food chain are open to innovation, versus 16% who don’t.
Foods that support emotional well-being are the most popular form of new tech among Europeans, followed by personalised nutrition, indoor farming, and algae-based foods. Only a third support animal-free dairy products made from precision fermentation, while an equal number of Europeans are in opposition.
The most disliked innovation is insect protein (rejected by 62% of Europeans), although 3D-printed food and genetically-altered foods aren’t far behind (58% and 57%, respectively).
As for cultivated meat, more people are opposed to it (45%) than in favour (29%). This comes against the backdrop of Italy’s ban on cultivated meat, and similar (though so far unsuccessful) efforts by countries like France, Romania, and Hungary. At the same time, the European region is an emerging leader in the novel foods space, with several homegrown companies undergoing regulatory checks in other countries, and one startup selling cultivated chicken for pets beginning last week.
The EIT Food Trust Report also comes amid calls by doctors, climate experts, food giants, and even farmers to accelerate the protein transition in the EU and spotlight sustainability in the European Council’s upcoming agrifood vision.
“Across the board, we’re seeing a lack of trust in food systems actors to put consumers’ best interests at heart, and provide accurate information about food, health and sustainability,” said Kuhn.
“As food systems professionals, we have a major opportunity to transform the way consumers perceive the bodies that produce, process, market and regulate the food they eat. Collaboration will be key as we move towards greater transparency and accountability.”
Food and climate tech investors remained cautious with their cash in 2024, as funding for alternative protein dipped, investments failed to align with emissions impact, and women founders were sidelined yet again.
The venture sector is experiencing a crunch overall, with 2024 being a disappointing 12 months for those looking for funding. GlobalData’s Deals Database suggests that early-stage rounds – which remain key for the growth of the wider climate tech ecosystem – were down 14.2% last year, while growth, expansion, and late-stage funding rounds decreased by 2.7%.
Moreover, fewer firms are deploying less, as US-headquartered funds dropped from 8,315 to 6,175 in 2024. The Financial Times reported that this trend concentrates “power among a small group of mega-firms”, leaving “smaller VCs in a fight for survival”. Further, it thins out “funding options for smaller companies”.
Businesses in the food tech world may have hoped for an investment reset last year, after a tough 2023 forced downsizing, M&As, and in some cases, closures. But venture capitalists continued to be cautious in 2024, with food tech funding shrinking, and investment in alternative protein players declining for a third consecutive year.
This is reflective of the broader 38% dip in climate tech venture funding, from $52B to $32B last year, according to BloombergNEF research, which in turn was the result of a shift in investor interest towards artificial intelligence (AI), where financing crossed $100B.
Layoffs, mergers and takeovers are part of a trend that’s likely to continue this year, according to Sharyn Murray, senior manager of investor engagement and financing at the Good Food Institute, an alternative protein think tank.
“While challenging for individual companies, such consolidation is a natural phase of industry maturation and can accelerate technological and operational progress for those that remain,” she says.
Speaking of trends, there are several to pick out from 2024 data on food tech funding – let’s just say it was a win for AI, fermentation, and men.
The emissions-funding mismatch
Courtesy: Sightline Climate
According to climate tech data platform Sightline Climate‘s 2024 investment report, the “still-high interest rates, delayed IRA funding rollouts, and political uncertainties created headwinds” for investors, blocking any restart the “2023 ‘wait-and-see’ crowd had hoped” for.
Nevertheless, the authors note the sector did settle down, as venture funding in climate tech fell by 14% to $30B in 2024, much less than the 24% drop it experienced 12 months earlier. Average deal size similarly dipped by 14%, while the value of growth rounds was down by 48%.
Courtesy: Sightline Climate
The average deal size in the food and land use vertical – which includes alternative proteins – was 6% lower in 2024 ($15M), though it is now the second most populated climate tech sector (behind energy) in terms of deal numbers, with more than 250 new companies raising money last year.
While food and land use had the second-highest number of funding deals (768), the total dollars poured into the vertical is disproportionate to the impact it has on the climate. The report suggests that this sector accounts for 22% of global emissions while receiving only 18.5% of climate tech capital ($29.3M) last year.
In its State of Climate Tech Funding 2024 report, PWC writes that “higher borrowing costs and uncertain economic conditions weighed on the broader deal-making market”, which resulted in a climate tech funding decline. The authors found that sector investments decreased “by 29%, from $79B, between Q4 2022 and Q3 2023, to $56B in the ensuing four quarters” and venture capital and private equity flows came down from $799B to $673B, contracting from 9.9% to 8.3%, with transaction volumes way down too as “investors and start-ups are finding it tougher than ever to make deals”.
Europe making gains, Asia not so much
Courtesy: DigitalFoodLab
The geographical makeup of the climate and food funding landscape has changed over the past few years with some regions gaining on others.
In the first half of 2024, while no region was spared from the investment declines of the previous years, Europe was “slightly less affected” by the challenges, according to analysis by Paris-based food tech consultancy DigitalFoodLab. This echoes previous data illustrating that Europe overtook the US in funding for the first time in 2023, making up 58% of global investments.
“Europe had been ignored for some time, maybe due to the old continent being slow to structure its innovation ecosystem (incubators, business angels, etc.),” Matthieu Vincent, co-founder and partner at DigitalFoodLab, told Green Queen in September. But the emergence of large delivery startups with an international focus “definitely helped put the continent on the global food tech map”.
Within the alternative protein world, too, 50% of all investments between Q1 and Q3 2024 came from Europe, garnering $528M. North America was second with a 38% share, and Asia a distant third at 10%.
Vincent ascribed the decline to the 80% fall in China, which in turn was a result of a shift away from delivery startups. Food science and alternative protein companies dominated investment (36% of the share), while in the second half of the year, analysts didn’t “observe a bounce back or even a plateau as investments keep declining”.
Source: AgFunder
Numbers shared by data analytics firm MAGNiTT in its 2024 Emerging Markets Venture Capital Report show that total venture funding in Southeast Asia was down 45%, with both exits and the number of deals decreasing by more than 30% and 20% respectively. While Singapore – a hub for food tech in the Asia-Pacific region – continues to be the most active emerging market for VC, climate tech is not on the menu, with fintech dominating deal flow.
A January 2025 Deal Street Asia report depicts a similar picture. The data outlines that total deal volume in the region last year decreased by 10.3% (633 deals) compared to 2023, while deal value fell by 41.7% to $4.56B, less than half of the capital raised in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, revelations of fraud at one of the agrifood darlings of the Southeast Asian tech ecosystem have sent chills across the region’s investment community.
That said, a report by AgFunder about APAC agrifood tech sector funding found that “while was still lower than 2020 levels in terms of dollar amounts, the number of deals in the first three quarters of 2024 (616) has already surpassed the full-year totals of each of the last three years, indicating that VCs remain interested in the category, but are more cautious in doling out larger amounts to single companies”.
AgFunder’s research also underscored some positive trends for alternative food, which falls under the report’s ‘Innovative Food’ category. The latter “attracted $204M by the end of October, an 85% increase from the same period in 2023, with deal count also growing from 49 to 59.”
Funding for fermentation proteins grows as investors quit plant-based and cultivated meat
Courtesy: GFI
Funding for alternative proteins continued to decline in 2024, dropping by 27% from the previous year. This was driven by VCs abandoning the plant-based protein vertical (a 64% decrease) and the cultivated meat space (down 40%). Worryingly, the latter only saw $6M in financing in the second half of 2024.
Plant-based meat was hit by the ultra-processed food debate, with misinformation from lobby groups causing consumers to question how healthy these products are. Meanwhile, in the US, lawmakers in more than a dozen states brought legal actions against cell-cultured beef. Two states (Florida and Alabama) went ahead with a ban, and several other states look likely this year.
The bright spot was fermentation. Companies working in this vertical attracted 43% more investment last year than in 2023 and made up four of the five largest alternative protein funding rounds. Even governments – from the US to the Netherlands – are getting involved with grant-based financial support.
Helene Grosshans, infrastructure investment manager at GFI Europe, wrote in August about why investors are increasingly attracted to fermentation-based proteins. “Many of the fermentation companies that received large investments are focused on leveraging agricultural and food industry sidestreams as a sustainable feed source, helping produce food more efficiently and affordably – both of which are attractive propositions for investors.”
James Petrie, CEO of fermentation startup Nourish Ingredients concurs. “The food tech sector, particularly in plant-based and precision fermentation, is experiencing a significant correction. We’re seeing companies that once commanded huge valuations facing massive down rounds or recapitalisation,” he wrote in an op-ed for Green Queen last month.
Analysis based on Pitchbook data shared by Trellis showed that women-founded businesses received just 0.4% ($135.8M ) of the $33.5B invested in US climate tech startups in the first nine months of 2024, compared to $2.45B secured by mixed-gender-led startups.
Part of this is a problem of underrepresentation within the VC world itself – Pitchbook data from 2022 exposed that only 16% of VC decision-makers in the US are women, while 96% of VC firms have a majority male population of decision-makers.
This is despite the fact that startups founded by women offer investors a much better return – 78 cents for every dollar, compared to 31 cents for male-founded businesses – and provide a 34% better return on equity than companies with minimal or no women in leadership. Female-founded startups also exit faster (7.2 years versus 8.1 years for the overall average).
Continued uncertainty amidst global tariffs, though investors face attractive entry points
Courtesy: Bloomberg via Getty Images
“2024 wasn’t the launchpad [climate tech] investors had hoped for. The slow rollout of Inflation Reduction Act funds and guidance meant a lot of projects stayed stalled. Political uncertainty in Europe and the US stunted investment as investors continued to wait and see,” Sightline Climate co-founders Kim Zou and Mark Taylor write in their report.
While Zou and Taylor contend that “the uncertainty is mostly over” saying that “while the US may back away from climate commitments, markets anticipating higher EU carbon prices will be transformative for hard-to-abate sectors,” others are not so sure.
Fortune spoke to a handful of generalist venture capitalists about President Donald Trump’s tariffs and looming trade war(s), who pointed out uncertainty will almost certainly lower valuations, decrease exits and give investors pause in terms of deployment. While the investors were speaking broadly, it stands to reason that climate tech and food tech are worried too.
Still, some founders remain hopeful. Nourish Ingredients’ Petrie drew on historical parallels to point to a brighter future: “Every transformative industry has gone through periods of correction and consolidation. Current valuations, while challenging, create attractive entry points for new investors.”
“The days of raising significant capital on potential alone are behind us. That is not necessarily a bad thing for a sector that badly needs to mature. Investors have shifted their focus from promises of transformational products toward clear, tangible paths to revenue and offtake deals,” he added.
“This creates a particular challenge for companies that have blown their wad on CapEx before firming up customer demand, but this simultaneously creates opportunities for those willing to be patient and strategic.”
After revolutionising vegan cheese, Miyoko Schinner is leveraging her decades-long experience to teach everything plant-based at all nine University of California campuses.
Longtime animal rights activist, vegan dairy entrepreneur and plant-based chef Miyoko Schinner wants to change the food system. The whole darned thing.
“We are on the precipice of redefining what the food system could look like, and in order to understand that, we have to really dive deep into the current food system and understand every aspect,” she says.
“Not just the problem with animal agriculture, but the consolidation, the distribution system, the inequities around the world. Not just food deserts, but what food companies here are doing to impact food choices in developing countries,” she continues.
“As we try to redefine what a better food system could look like based on plants, we can’t just swap out the products. We have to really examine it from every angle and not repeat the mistakes that we’ve made in the past. And students are going to be the stewards of the future.”
Schinner is speaking to Green Queen from Berkeley, where she serves as a co-instructor on a new plant-based course at the University of California. Together with Brittany Sartor, who founded the programme, she is helping students advance the transformation to a plant-forward food system.
And where better do it than Berkeley, the hub of nouvelle American cuisine, and home to Alice Waters’s pioneering farm-to-table eatery Chez Panisse, which spearheaded the locavore food movement in the US.
“If you want to call Berkeley the birthplace for that type of movement, you can call Brittany the mother of this class, because she dreamed up this entire course and wrote the syllabus, and I’ve just joined at the last minute to help put some padding into it,” says Schinner.
The makings of University of California’s plant-based course
The University of California, Berkeley has a programme called Decals, a set of courses created and taught by students, covering topics not traditionally found in the institute’s coursework. When Sartor was a student at the Haas School of Business, she had an a-ha moment when she realised that “we’re not talking about plant-based alternatives” enough.
As she put together a syllabus for the class, she was on the hunt for a faculty sponsor. “I eventually connected with Will Rosenzweig, who teaches edible education,” she recalls. Rosenzweig had just happened to connect with a master’s student, Samantha Derrick, who was developing a course covering the public health aspects of plant-based foods.
“And he said: ‘You guys should just join forces create this multidisciplinary course that covers all aspects of the food system: public health, climate, environment, animal welfare,’” says Sartor, who describes herself as a “long-term vegan”.
She and Derrick combined to introduce two courses under the Plant Futures programme, one of which was a single-unit crash course called Introduction to Plant-Centric Food Systems. The class hosted dozens of guest speakers – Schinner among them – and has now evolved into the new three-unit course available to all nine University of California campuses.
The online-only course, funded by the Office of the President, already has around 55 students enrolled. It covers several critical modules, spanning Climate & Environment, Health & Nutrition, Animal Welfare, Social Impacts, Innovation, Policy & Law, Behavioral Change, Media, and Plant-Forward Cooking.
Students from all diets, all over the world
Courtesy: Plant Futures
The Plant Futures programme is part of a growing trend of apprenticeships and university courses focusing on plant-based food and alternative proteins. This summer, for example, the Austrian government will launch a vegan and vegetarian culinary apprenticeship, as part of its green economy plan. Schinner herself has been teaching an online vegan cheesemaking course too.
The plant-based course at the University of California was partly born out of growing student demand, with interest in these foods on the rise across generations. Sartor believes sustainability and the climate argument hold the most weight with the youth, while the older generations are in it for health or animal welfare reasons.
“Not everyone’s vegan or vegetarian either,” notes Schinner. “It is an incredibly international group of students. We have students from all over the world – people from Asia, Africa, just everywhere.”
The team has partnered with over 60 organisations and brands, including Grener by Default, Mercy for Animals, Califia Farms, Tofurky, and Beyond Meat.
“Thankfully, there’s a ton of amazing non-profits that have been working in this space for a while. And so there are great partnerships there. In terms of startups, we really want them to be mission-aligned,” says Schinner. This could involve a non-vegan company working to develop a plant-based product.
For example, one of the projects students have worked on was to help Bel Group reformulate its iconic Babybel cheese through a dairy-free formulation, making it less grainy and more colour-identical to the original.
The expansion of the course to all campuses also coincides with the introduction of the Plant-Forward Cooking module. It’s also an evolution of the mini-cooking sessions from the one-unit class. “We got course feedback from the students that that was one of the most valuable things. They never – in their high school or college classes – learned how to cook.
“And I think especially with like, plant-based cooking, people are just like hesitant. They think it’s going to be harder, and so I’m excited for that throughout the course.”
Sartor likened it to the “documentary effect”, referring to popular films like Cowspiracy and The Game Changers, which influence people to give up meat or dairy. “Some people look at documentaries maybe as being biased or not reputable, where I think being part of an accredited curriculum at a university has an added layer of reputation to it.”
Trump administration will ‘create a landscape we haven’t witnessed’
Courtesy: Gage Skidmore/Flickr/CC
We’re talking about food systems transformation at a time when it is perhaps more polarising than ever before. Scientists the world over have said we need to grow and eat less meat to lower emissions, land and water use, and food insecurity.
Animal protein has become part of a culture war in the US of late. Carnivore diets and raw milk have become major points of discussion, Elon Musk has sung the praises of beef on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and lobby groups and mostly Republican lawmakers have attacked alternative proteins as ultra-processed foods that should be banned.
The impact? Sales have continued to slow over the last two years, as has investment in startups. Venture capital flowing into the sector was down by 27% last year, with cultivated meat – the target of legislation in more than a dozen states – witnessing a 40% dip.
Courtesy: GFI
“The industry is in a period of self-examination right now, trying to figure out what’s going on,” says Schinner, who built one of the sector’s most successful companies in Miyoko’s Creamery, subsequently exiting in 2023. “What is the direction we should be going in? Are we making the right products? Are we addressing the right audience, and is this something that should be sold with huge money or not?”
On Donald Trump, she says: “It’s hard to know where the current administration is going to be with this. But, we can only guess that there are going to be limitations to certain initiatives. I think anything that’s technologically based that’s going to threaten potential industrial animal agriculture is going to be seen as a threat.”
She adds: “That’s going to create a whole new landscape that we hadn’t previously witnessed as much […] and we’re going to have to dive deep into how we can get the industry to grow in this landscape.”
Products aren’t the be-all and end-all
Courtesy: Plant Futures
Schinner believes we “can’t conflate products with the future” of the plant-based sector. “We’re just focused on the sales of products that we’re making, and that doesn’t reflect the entire picture,” she explains.
“The whole world’s not going to go vegan because there’s Beyond Burger, right? But they might go vegan if we promote a plant-rich diet,” she says. “We put all our eggs in that basket and threw a lot of money at it and assumed that that was what was going to create conversion. I’m not convinced of that.
“We have to change food culture,” she adds. “You can’t just change what we put on the shelf […] So the evolution of the human being has to go along with it if we’re going to make that change.”
I ask Schinner what mistakes the food system has made historically. “I’m going to say white saviour mentality,” Schinner responds. “What we did in developing countries, with protein in Africa, with formula, patented GMO seeds that went into places like India and robbed communities of food sovereignty.”
“That’s when the food system is focused on profits rather than actually feeding people. And so I wonder, as the plant-based industry is focused just as much on growth, IP protection and consolidation, whether or not we could be making the same mistakes that could jeopardise the health and the wealth of people in other parts of the world, as well as here in the US.”
Sartor notes that our food system has changed rapidly, even just in the last century or two and suggests it can change again. “There’s definitely a chance that it will change rapidly over the next 200 [years],” she says.
“I don’t think it’s probably feasible to say everyone will go vegan, but I do think that people are going to realise that how we’re doing animal agriculture right now is not sustainable. It’s literally just not sustainable for even the farmers themselves.
“Inevitably, there’s going to be a shift away from as many animal products as our population grows, because it’s just… it has to.”
Upcoming cookbook takes ‘whole new approach’ to vegan cheese
Courtesy: Celeste Noche
Schinner is the original vegan dairy queen. She made her name as the chef-owner of Now and Zen, an all-vegan eatery in San Francisco in the late 1980s, and the founder of plant-based dairy startup Miyoko’s Creamery, whose products are available in over 20,000 retail doors.
But legal disputes over trade secrets and IP led to her departure from the company in 2022 – she no longer has any involvement in the business, which installed Stuart Kronauge as its new CEO in 2023.
Schinner has been focusing on Rancho Compasión, the animal sanctuary she opened a decade ago, which educates about 50 kids each week about humanity and the food system. A prolific author, she is about to release her seventh cookbook, The Vegan Creamery, this September.
“I’m really excited about it, because it’s a whole new approach to making everything from milk to cheese to ice cream using all kinds of ingredients that I know,” she says. It’s not just all cashews – there are cheeses made from watermelon seeds, or a vegan halloumi from mung beans.
“I have recipes in the book where I actually coagulate the plant milks, separate the whey, and then the curds are pressed and over time, they melt into one smooth cheese,” she reveals. “So there’s some techniques in there that are unique, haven’t been seen before, and I am not applying for patents.
“I am sharing the recipes with the world, hoping that it will encourage more people to embark on this path. Hopefully, it will be the book that launches 10,000 vegan cheese companies.”
The founders of London-based startup Omni – which makes plant-based pet food – bagged £75,000 from two investors on Dragons’ Den UK last night.
Plant-based food continues to succeed on the small screen, with dog food maker Omni becoming the latest vegan company to win over investors on TV.
Guy Sandelowsky and Shiv Sivakumar, who founded the pet nutrition startup in 2020, appeared on the UK edition of Dragons’ Den on Thursday night and struck a joint deal with Deborah Meaden and Steven Bartlett.
The famous investors agreed to pour £75,000 into the startup in exchange for a collective 2.5% equity stake, valuing the vegan dog food business at £3M.
“I had already been looking for a healthy, balanced alternative to processed-meat dog food, so when Guy and Shiv presented Omni and its credentials as a highly nutritional, vet-formulated choice, I was bound to invest. Trust in a product is hugely important to dog owners,” said Meaden.
“The big test came, though, after the den, when I offered the food and treats to my pack of dogs, and they literally woofed them down – that certainly sealed the deal,” she added.
Omni’s pet food pitch on Dragons’ Den
Courtesy: BBC
Omni sells a range of vet-formulated foods and supplements for dogs, such as No-Chicken Pot Pie, No-Beef Casserole, breath supplements, and Training Treats for physical and mental health. The products are catered to pets with sensitivities, allergies, anxiety, and gut issues, among others.
Sandelowsky and Sivakumar began thier pitch asking for £75,000 for a 1% stake in Omni. “I’m a small-animal vet that’s been in practice for just shy of 10 years, and I’ve seen a number of nutrition-related diseases in our pets,” Sandelowsky explained.
“At Omni, we believe that novel proteins – like those derived from yeast, pules, algae, and soon lab-grown meat – can be healthy and as delicious as traditional meat-based diets,” he added.
The company generated over £2.5M in sales in 2022 and 2023, and 80% of its 30,000-strong customer base are subscribers. It has delivered more than five million meals to pets globally.
Peter Jones questioned the £7.5M valuation set by Omni’s founders, and Sivakumar responded by laying out the business’s forecast for the upcoming 12 months, when it expects to become profitable. He added that the startup had recently secured £2M in VC funding at a valuation of £10M. But Jones was still unconvinced and exited the discussions.
The entrepreneurs were met with similar scepticism by Touker Suleyman, who wanted a stake of 30%. “You’re delusional about what this is really worth,” he said. “So I’m out.”
Another Dragon, Sara Davies, praised the founders and their pitch, and didn’t feel the valuation was outlandish. But she wasn’t sold on the project enough at the terms being asked of the investors, and took herself out of the running.
‘Wealth and experience’ of Dragons worthwhile
Courtesy: Omni
But Meaden and Bartlett were impressed by Omni’s lifetime value of customers – while their cost of acquisition is around £40, repeat rates have meant its customers spent £400 each in just two years.
Meaden made the first offer, asking for 3% of the business – which was matched by Bartlett. The founders then went to discuss, whispering: “That’s basically the two dragons that we wanted.”
Sandelowsky and Sivakumar asked if the two investors would like to join forces and come in at a 2.5% stake. After some deliberation, the Dragons agreed to the deal.
“Through the jubilation of hearing a Dragon say: ‘I believe in you,’ there’s an undercurrent of feeling that you have to now give away a large part of your business – something that we have spent years building, only to give away quite a substantial portion of it after a couple of minutes in the Den,” Sivakumar said.
“Ultimately, we felt the wealth of expertise and guidance brought by the Dragons was definitely worthwhile,” he added. “The experience, to us, really affirmed how much we complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses, both driven by a passion to really revolutionise pet nutrition.”
Speaking to the Daily Express, Sandelowsky said: “We were happy with the result, the number that we arrived at, I think it could potentially be one of the highest valuations for a pet food business.”
Cultivated meat and ‘Ozempic for dogs’
Courtesy: Meatly/Omni
The pitch also revealed Omni’s plans for the future – the founders are targetng an exit in the next three to five years, the hope being that it is acquired by a bigger pet food company for around £150M.
The startup has also hinted that it’s developing a natural weight loss powder for dogs, which it has teased as “Ozempic for dogs” – this effort would be helped by the involvement of Bartlett, who has a stake in several health and wellness companies, including peronalised nutrition app Zoe.
The episode aired the same day news broke that Brits can buy cultivated chicken for their pets starting Friday, with food tech startup Meatly joining forces with vegan pet food maker The Pack to launch dog treats with hybrid meat.
But a year ago, Meatly had teamed up with Omni to co-develop cat food too, prototypes of which were showcased on Dragons’ Den. It remains to be seen whether this partnership will materialise in the market.
Either way, it is a big moment for cultivated pet food across the globe, with multiple companies eyeing regulatory approval for thier novel proteins in the US and Singapore.
Omni’s investment on Dragons’ Den also comes as more and more future food startups find success on the show and its sister programmes across the world. In the last year, for example, Meat the Mushroom and Finneato Fysh Foods have both won deals on Shark Tank US for their plant-based meat and seafood, respectively, while vegan bakery brand The Cinnamon Kitchen found success on Shark Tank India.
Unlike its rivals, Canada’s agrifood tech sector is built on public investment, which leaves a “venture capital gap” – and Trump tariffs threaten to further complicate things.
Plant proteins, functional foods, and food waste solutions are the top domains in Canada’s agrifood tech ecosystem, but despite “notable growth”, a lack of private sector funding has left the country “significantly behind” global competitors like the US and Canada, a new analysis has found.
Canada is home to 320 agrifood tech startups and scale-up companies, which have collectively raised $2.9B since 2014 – but puts the nation 13th globally in terms of investment.
And despite food tech firms comprising 75% of the sector, they have only received 56% of the investment share in the last decade, much lower than the global average of 83%.
The report by the Canadian Food Innovation Network ascribes this to “limited private capital” – venture capital backs only 40% of food tech rounds in Canada (compared to 60% in the UK and the US), while government grants take up a 30% share, much higher than in the UK (5%) and the US (8%).
Finding the balance between public and private funding “will be key to unlocking the full potential of Canada’s food tech sector” and making the country a global leader, said Cam Crowder, founding general partner at Redstick Ventures.
The inaugural Foodtech in Canada 2025 Ecosystem Report analysed data from food tech ecosystem platform Forward Fooding, covering over 9,950 companies across the world over a 10-year period.
Venture capital gaps have ‘profound implications’
Courtesy: Canadian Food Innovation Network
Since 2018, agrifood tech startups in Canada attracted $1.6B in funding from both private and public investors – but this is a far cry from the $8.8B their counterparts secured in the UK, and the $86.6B raised in the US.
One of the issues is the size of larger funding rounds. At pre-seed and seed levels, investment sums in Canada align closely with those of the US and the UK. But the gap widens with Series A and Series B rounds, whose sizes are about half as big in Canada. Series C rounds, meanwhile, are only a third of the size seen stateside.
“This discrepancy may represent a significant barrier for Canadian food tech startups seeking access to growth capital,” the report notes. “These gaps carry profound implications, including challenges in scaling operations, building supply chains, meeting regulatory requirements, and achieving strong exit opportunities.”
This is compounded by the multi-pronged challenges facing the agrifood tech ecosystem in Canada, which include lagging productivity, labour shortages, supply chain complexities, and climate change.
“Rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and shifting precipitation patterns are already hampering agricultural production, disrupting supply chains, and impacting food quality,” reads the report.
“These challenges increase costs for producers and heighten vulnerabilities across the sector, demanding greater investment in climate-resilient practices and technologies to ensure long-term sustainability and food security.”
Plant-based sector a bright spot
Courtesy: Canadian Food Innovation Network
Despite the obstacles, Canada’s agrifood tech sector has “significant untapped potential”, which could be unlocked with a greater focus on sustainable foods.
Outside of on-farm innovation, the plant-based sector is “central to the country’s broader food tech ecosystem”. Valued at $1.7B in 2023, this category represents 26% of all food tech firms in Canada, greater than the 14% proportion globally.
Firms making plant-based meat, seafood, dairy and other ingredients have commanded 12% of food tech funding to date in Canada. The country’s landscape provides B2B opportunities for innovation with functional ingredients like pea and soy proteins, the two most popular ingredients for meat analogues.
But the presence of B2C operators remains limited, as they’re often less capital-efficient and represent a greater risk for investors.
These companies face a host of challenges that could impact the sector’s growth trajectory. For example, plant-based foods are often more expensive to produce, with meat alternatives priced at least 30% higher due to high production costs, specialised ingredients, and smaller-scale processing.
Taste and texture also continue to be a barrier for Canadian consumers, which is why the report calls for further product innovation to alleviate these concerns. Moreover, varying labelling requirements and a complex regulatory landscape complicate market entry and consumer understanding.
If these issues are addressed, Canada’s plant-based sector “can strengthen its position both domestically and as an exporter, aligning with consumer demand and supporting sustainable growth in food tech”.
In addition to plant-based foods, biotech-enabled functional ingredients, upcycled foods, and food waste solutions are the strongest verticals in Canada’s food tech industry.
Trump tariffs a threat to Canada’s food tech ecosystem
Courtesy: Trump White House/Flickr/CC
The Canadian government has led the way in terms of support for plant-based food. Protein Industries Canada, a public-private partnership for alternative proteins and one of the country’s economic clusters, has invested more than $105M into projects that promote sustainable protein production and innovation, encouraging collaboration across the value chain.
Speaking of the government, the tussle with President Donald Trump’s administration over tariffs could have major implications for Canada’s food tech sector.
Trump announced a 25% tariff on imports from Canada, before the latter’s outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded with his own 25% tariffs on products sourced from its neighbour. The dispute is currently on hold, with Trump delaying the move by at least 30 days.
But the US is Canada’s largest export market, taking up over 77% of the share, so any tariffs would hit both countries’ economies hard. In the agrifood tech context, it would make meat alternatives and plant-based dairy products from brands like Gardein, Daiya or Bettermoo(d) more expensive for Americans. This, in turn, could hurt the bottom line of Canadian firms – and the opposite is true too if Trudeau’s retaliatory tariffs come into effect.
With more than 60 companies specialising in plant-based foods in the country, any such tariffs from the two neighbours would be a blow to Canada’s largest food tech category.
Juicy Marbles, known for its plant-based whole cuts, has released Meaty Meat, a high-protein, high-fibre lamb analogue in the US.
Slovenian plant-based meat maker Juicy Marbles is building on its North American launch with a new marbled lamb product that features nearly 70% of the dairy recommended intake of protein, and 40% of fibre.
Marketed as Meaty Meat, the lamb is currently only available in the US and Canada, and is sold in 180g packs of two. It contains 26% soy protein concentrate, complemented with sunflower oil, natural flavours, red beet juice, and minimal amounts of pea protein concentrate, apple extract, salt, and vitamins and minerals.
It’s the startup’s first launch since the initial introduction of its Baby Ribs with edible bones, and is a marker of its expansion plans in North America, where it plans to roll out its whole cuts in retail this year.
Courtesy: Juicy Marbles
Giving Americans what they want
Founded in 2019 by Luka Sinček, Maj Hrovat, Tilen Travnik and Vladimir Mićković, Juicy Marbles began with whole-cut beef steaks made using patent-pending ‘reverse grinder’ tech that mimics the muscle texture and marbling of conventional steak.
It layers plant protein fibres on top of each other to replicate animal tissue, helped by deposits of hardened sunflower oil. The effort aims to solve two of plant-based meat’s biggest pain points: taste and texture.
Research shows that most vegan analogues fall short of meat-eaters’ taste expectations. And among the Americans either likely to buy meat alternatives or still undecided, their taste and texture would only convince 16% to drive to the supermarket to purchase them.
Known for its quirky marketing, Juicy Marbles describes the Meaty Meat as a “cosy, sensual, hearty, and whimsical” product that will transport eaters to a place far away. “Take a whiff, and you’re gambling with a band of spice traders in a smokey yurt on the steppes of Mongolia. Take another, and retreat to the candle-lit warmth of a snowy inn where the barmaid, Helga, is cooking a mean shepherd’s pie,” the brand says on its website.
And in October, a report by 84.51° (the market research division of Kroger) showed that high-protein is the most prized nutritional attribute in food products for its shoppers, with clean ingredients another major priority – Juicy Marbles is making a play here too, highlighting that the new vegan lamb contains “no thickeners, binders, or preservatives”.
Juicy Marbles’s cheapest product yet
Juicy Marbles first came to market in 2021, and has since expanded to 3,500 European stores, with listings in Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Lidl, Waitrose, Whole Foods Market, Billa, Migros and more.
Its product lineup includes a whole-cut lion, a thick-cut filet, and bone-in ribs, and have impressed consumers and expert panels globally. The ribs were anointed the Most Innovative Vegan Product at PETA’s 2023 Vegan Food Awards, and the brand was named Champion in the plant-based meat category at The Grocer’s 2023 Food and Packaging Awards. And last year, its sales jumped after a mention on Netflix’s You Are What You Eat documentary.
The new lamb is designed to be versatile – it can be pulled apart for tacos and wraps, sliced into strips for salads and sandwiches, or cut into chunks for rice bowls and noodles. It cooks in eight minutes and, according to the company, “opens up an entirely new world of cuisine to home chefs who’ve grown weary of beef, chicken, and pork alternatives”.
Courtesy: Juicy Marbles
Meaty Meat is also Juicy Marbles’s cheapest product yet, costing 26% less per ounce than its other offerings – this will be key to attracting more consumers, since the affordability of plant proteins is becoming more and more important for Americans. For some, it even trumps flavour.
The UK is no longer at risk of falling behind other countries in the protein transition, thanks to a collective outlay of £75M in future food innovation. But more can be done in the upcoming food strategy.
As the Labour government begins work on a food strategy, a new analysis shows that the UK has injected £75M towards the development of sustainable proteins.
This sum represents 60% of the £125M investment recommended by Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy in 2021, which noted that alternative proteins could help the UK cut emissions by lowering meat consumption, and boost the economy via the creation of 10,000 manufacturing jobs.
There were fears that without government support, the UK would risk falling behind its European counterparts in the protein transition – but that’s no longer the case, according to alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute (GFI) Europe, which carried out the analysis.
Food and environment secretary Steve Reed has indicated that he is “interested in building on the work that Henry Dimbleby started” and pledged to work with the food sector to develop the new national food strategy in the first half of the year.
This is crucial too, with the UK off track for its net-zero target, and a new report urging food policy overhaul to battle climate change and global insecurity.
“Ministers should use the forthcoming national food strategy as a springboard to build on the impressive work that has already taken place and develop the policy, regulatory, scientific and commercial landscape needed to accelerate protein diversification over the rest of the decade,” Linus Pardoe, senior UK policy manager at GFI Europe, tells Green Queen.
New research centres a ‘major step forward’
Courtesy: Imperial College London
The 2021 strategy advised the government to invest in homegrown scientists and startups developing plant-based foods, cultivated meat and fermentation-derived ingredients. It suggested pouring £50M into an innovation cluster, and £75M in grants for startups.
Boris Johnson, who was prime minister at the time, heeded the recommendation in the 2022 Government Food Strategy, committing to innovation funding, regulatory guidance, and a revamp of the novel food framework.
Following this, two UK Research and Innovation Council bodies jointly pledged at least £20M for alternative protein R&D. And since 2023, four major research centres have cropped up – the Cellular Agriculture Manufacturing Hub, the National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre, the Microbial Food Hub, and Bezos Earth Fund‘s Centre for Sustainable Protein have collectively been backed by over £60M in public and philanthropic funding.
While “it would be a stretch” to call these centres a cluster, their establishment is a “major step forward” and provides much-needed coordination of the UK’s alternative protein research and innovation ecosystem, according to GFI Europe.
Courtesy: GFI Europe
“Our recent analysis found that across Europe, the UK fell only behind the EU institutions and Denmark in terms of public and philanthropic funding for alternative protein research, while UK researchers have published more work in this area than those from anywhere else in the region,” says Pardoe.
He adds that the launch of the research centres is “an excellent start”, though “there is room for growth” to ensure UK scientists stay ahead of the curve. “Targeted public investments in key overlooked areas – such as optimising ingredients and developing locally-grown crops for plant-based meat and dairy products – is now needed to make sure the UK remains internationally competitive,” he explains.
Dimbleby’s strategy also proposed that any food business with over 250 employees must report on a range of health and sustainability metrics, including how much of their protein sales come from plant-based sources. But only 17% of major food companies voluntarily do so, with only Lidl GB breaking down its protein sales while setting a target to increase plant-based offerings.
Regulatory progress is commendable, but slow
UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer, a pescetarian, and his vegetarian wife Victoria | Courtesy: Number 10/Flickr/CC
The UK last year made several moves to break away from pre-Brexit novel food regulations, with the government investing £1.6M to create a new regulatory sandbox for cultivated meat, which is expected to help fast-track market approval for these proteins. The Food Safety Authority (FSA) also plans to set up a system of international cooperation, which would see the UK greenlight cultivated meat products approved in other countries.
Additionally, the FSA is creating a new public register to replace the existing system of requiring a statutory instrument (which adds up to six months to the assessment process), and removing the need for renewals of approvals every 10 years.
The progress has been positive yet slow. “The FSA’s announcement of a regulatory sandbox is an exciting sign that the UK government wants to capitalise on the strong investments made in cultivated meat research, by bringing products to market in a way that upholds Britain’s gold standard safety regulations,” says Pardoe.
“But while the sandbox is a welcome measure, other challenges still remain. The FSA has been under-resourced for a number of years – resulting in lengthy delays for product approvals – and the detailed guidelines for alternative protein startups first proposed in 2022 have yet to be published, meaning some companies lack the clarity needed when preparing dossiers,” he adds.
“The UK has also not yet introduced a modern approach to holding safe, limited taste testing for novel foods, similar to the protocol introduced by the Netherlands – another area that could enable startups to demonstrate progress and engage with consumers as they develop their products.”
Courtesy: Meatly
That said, the UK is about to be the first European country to offer cultivated meat to customers, with London startups Meatly and The Pack co-launching dog treats made from cultivated chicken and plant-based ingredients at Pets at Home starting tomorrow (February 7).
However, Pardoe says the job is only half done: “As the food strategy process progresses throughout 2025, we will develop key proposals to make sure the UK continues to grasp its status as a European alternative protein leader, enabling Britain to reap the potential of these foods to deliver green economic growth, boost food security and improve public health.”
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.
Andrew D Ive is the General Managing Partner at Big Idea Ventures.
What future food technologies most excite you?
Cultured meat and dairy: I’m still excited by this technology, the current scale-up phase and finding ways to work with the traditional protein industry to enhance protein production overall.
Precision fermentation: This is the second candidate in the race that can unlock a more sustainable food future.
Scaling Technology: Though not a specific technology, scaling presents challenges that require innovative solutions and approaches.
What are three future food verticals you are actively looking at for 2025?
Food and biology.
Agriculture and nature: Enhancing agriculture’s interaction with nature and biodiversity, and collaborating with top universities.
Food production technologies: Boosting food production and utilising waste to develop bio-materials, bio-surfaces, and sustainable packaging.
What do you consider the food tech sector’s greatest achievement in the past five years?
Investors have been supporting remarkable future food companies across various sectors, discovering what’s possible with cutting-edge technologies. The next focus is scaling these technologies to benefit the food system sustainably.
If you could wave a magic wand, how would you fix plant-based meat?
Enhance taste and texture, lower costs through scalable methods, and improve nutritional profiles to meet or surpass traditional meat.
What’s the top trait you look for in a founder?
Tenacity: the perseverance to navigate challenging times.
‘The One That Got Away’: tell us about the deal you wish you had gotten into, but didn’t.
The jury is still out.
What do you consider your most successful future food investment so far?
Too many great investments to choose just one. We have 20+ companies that have the potential for global impact in our portfolios.
What do you consider your most disappointing future food investment?
I am disappointed when a company that is growing well and has found product market fit fails because the founders fall out and don’t want to move forward as a team. This scenario is the most disappointing investment.
What do people get wrong most about VC?
VC is often not all about the money. Many of us are focused on finding and working with great founders and companies who have the potential to make an enormous difference in our world.
What is the most ‘future food’ dish or ingredient you have eaten this month?
Where is your favourite climate-forward restaurant/dish/place to eat anywhere in the world?
Did I mention the plant-based shrimp salad from Bayou Best Foods?
What’s your ‘why’? What motivates you to do what you do?
I believe founders, scientists and engineers have the ability to solve many of our greatest challenges and we need to do everything we can to help them to achieve their visions. Time is pressing.
Dutch cultivated meat pioneer Mosa Meat surpassed its crowdfunding goal of €1.5M ($1.56M) just 24 minutes after launch, with the total sum continuing to rise.
It took less than half an hour.
Mosa Meat, the company known for producing the world’s first cultivated beef burger, has demonstrated Europeans’ appetite for novel foods, reaching its target of raising €1.5M ($1.56M) via crowdfunding at breakneck speed.
The Dutch startup hit the goal 24 minutes after the investment opportunity went live, and the total has kept on climbing – less than two days later, Mosa Meat has been overfunded at nearly 175% of its target, raising €2.62M ($2.7M) from almost 1,050 investors.
The largest investment so far is valued at €1M ($1M). The campaign on Crowdcube remains open until February 25, unless it reaches the maximum funding limit of €13M (combined in the EU and the UK) before then.
The investment adds to Mosa Meat’s €40M ($42.4M) round last April, which took its total funding to $135M. Among its backers are big names like Leonardo DiCaprio, Sergey Brin, Chris Sacca, and the Mitsubishi Corporation.
“We are very excited that after receiving support from institutional investors, governments, meat producers and regulators, we can now also offer more consumers to join us on our mission,” Mosa Meat CEO Maarten Bosch said in a statement.
Why Mosa Meat took the crowdfunding route
Courtesy: Mosa Meat
Asked why Mosa Meat decided to open up to crowd investors, Bosch told Green Queen: “Ever since Mosa Meat was founded, we’ve had consumers reach out to us that asked if they could help further our mission by investing. With the progress that we have been making, getting closer to market introductions, we thought this was a good moment to start involving consumers and retail investors.”
He added that the startup will use the funds to “speed up final R&D before restaurant sales can start. We’ll also fund marketing for the first product launch, and the production of the first burgers intended for sale”.
Bosch noted that “the sheer volume of investment requests” Mosa Meat received after it submitted its regulatory dossier in the EU two weeks ago was “astounding”. “This campaign is about inclusivity; allowing those who support us to help shape the future of food alongside us,” he said.
The startup has filed for approval to sell a cultivated beef fat for use in blended meat products. The EU Commission and the European Food Safety Authority’s assessment is expected to take 18 months, and if successful, Mosa Meat would be able to sell the ingredient in all 27 member states and the three EEA countries.
It is also awaiting approval from the Singapore Food Agency and plans to apply in several other geographies, including the UK and possibly Switzerland.
French startup Gourmey is the only other startup that has applied for EU clearance. But several others – like Meatable, Vital Meat and Aleph Farms – are vying for the greenlight in Singapore. The UK has also seen applications from Vital Meat and Aleph Farms. The latter, which is already approved in Israel, is pursuing clearance in Thailand and Switzerland too.
Vow, meanwhile, is awaiting the go-ahead from Food Standards Australia New Zealand, having launched in Singapore and Hong Kong last year.
‘A clear sign’ that consumers want better options
Courtesy: Mosa Meat
Venture capitalists have been deserting the cultivated meat sector in the past 12-18 months lately- investment dropped by 75% in 2023, followed by another steep decline in 2024., leading to the demise of some startups and forcing others to restructure and conduct layoffs.
Mosa Meat is one of the outliers, evidenced by its €40M raise last year, and the instant success of the crowdfunding campaign. “The overwhelming response to our crowdfunding campaign shows just how strong the demand for cultivated meat remains, even in a challenging VC environment,” Bosch told Green Queen.
“Despite the situation in capital markets, we’re still seeing unwavering support from consumers, governments, established meat producers, regulators and other partners. It’s a clear sign that people want better options, without giving up what they love,” he added.
Bosch said the introduction of Mosa Meat’s burgers depends on where it first receives approval, as well as its production costs and volumes. “We can currently produce our burgers at restaurant price levels, and that’s where we’ll start introducing them. One of the options around introductions is to involve the people that participated in this crowdfunding,” he explained.
The Crowdcube campaign listed several rewards for backers based on the amount invested, from €750 all the way to €250,000. “There are options to get free burgers, skip the line once we get an approval, or even join our founders in Maastricht for an exclusive tasting event this year,” said Bosch.
Mosa Meat held a public tasting for cattle farmers, product developers and other industry representatives at its headquarters in Maastricht in July, where it dished out hybrid beef burgers.
Where can you taste it next? “We are currently creating our next-generation products and are preparing to submit tasting approvals for those this year,” said Bosch.
Other alternative protein startups that have successfully taken the crowdfunding approach include fellow cultivated meat company SuperMeat and plant-based meat players THIS, Heura and La Vie. The Pack, a vegan pet food player that just debuted dog treats blended with Meatly’s cultivated chicken, has also pursued crowdfunding.
