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- FoodTech Weekly #241 by Daniel S. Ruben
FoodTech Weekly #241 by Daniel S. Ruben
News on FoodTech, food, and society
Daniel S. Ruben
April 11, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes
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#241
Hi there,
Happy Friday to you all.
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This week's rundown:
💶 €2.7M for startup protecting fruits and vegs from ethylene, cutting food waste
🐮 $27.4M in funding to help breed low-methane livestock through natural methods
🧬 Dire wolves brought back from extinction with the help of 72,000 year-old DNA
Let's go!
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💬 Conversation with Ed Steele of Hoxton Farms
Fat is key for flavor, texture, satiety, and overall deliciousness. But traditional animal fat is linked to health concerns, and industrial animal agriculture is linked to many negative environmental and animal welfare issues. Plant-based fats fail to fully replicate the taste and functionality of real animal fat. And consumers want healthier options. Enter Hoxton Farms — which grows real animal fat without the animals. To learn more, I spoke with Ed Steele, Co-Founder of Hoxton — read the full conversation here.
Ed Steele / Hoxton Farms
💰 Funding
🇵🇱 Fresh Inset has bagged a €2.7M ($3M) funding round, bringing its total funding to almost €20M ($22.3M). The company offers a sticker-based solution that protects fruits and vegetables from ethylene during storage, shipment, and in retail, thus extending shelf life and reducing food waste.
🇰🇷 INTAKE, which uses yeast-based precision fermentation to produce protein powders used as a foundation for alternatives to animal-sourced foods, has closed a KRW 13.5B ($9.3M) Series C round.
🇫🇷 Insect protein company Ÿnsect, which recently entered bankruptcy protection, has secured a €10M ($11M) bridge round from existing investors. The company also replaced its CEO.
🇸🇪 Musselfeed has raised SEK 10M ($1M). The company grows mussels that cleans the oceans of nitrogen and phosphorus; then the mussels are turned into a powder and flour, which are sold as protein feed for animals, food for humans, and as a taste enhancer for seafood.
🇳🇱 Hippotainer has harvested €100K ($112K) in pre-seed funding from StartLife, OostNL and the Province of Gelderland. The startup develops hydroponic farms housed inside shipping containers.
🎙️ Investment Climate: How to get funded in 2025 with Jason Rosenbaum of Actual Veggies
This week, Alex Shandrovsky met with Jason Rosenbaum, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Actual Veggies. The plant-based startup recently closed a $7M Series A. Jason breaks down why his company took a bold contrarian path in the crowded plant-based market—eschewing meat analogs and ultra-processed ingredients in favor of clean-label, whole-food veggie burgers that actually taste like vegetables.
Listen to the full episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Top three findings from this conversation:
Taste + Clean Label = Winning Combo. Actual Veggies products avoid pea protein (initially), gums, binders, and other ultra-processed ingredients to maintain flavor and simplicity. “We're being very cautious with how much pea protein or other vegan protein sources we're putting in there. What happens is that when you use pea protein, the taste and texture start to alter. It also has a bad connotation. Some people say it doesn't sit.”
Investor Updates: Radical Transparency is an Edge. Jason shares detailed quarterly updates with real sales numbers, financials, and asks—building trust and enthusiasm from the cap table. " For the investors, we aren't talking to them daily, weekly, or monthly; we are sending quarterly update emails. We send whatever is happening with the company, we have a whole format of what we like to show. We want to show things that we wouldn't usually show to the public, but because they're our investors, they're part of our family and inner circle. We're very upfront and honest.”
Strong Gross Margins Set You Apart. Actual Veggies operates with margins in the 50% range, allowing room for sustainable growth and marketing investment—unlike many plant-based startups. " Investors want to see 40%, 50%, 60% margins... starting negative is a bad idea. We start with strong gross margins in the 50s. That’s rare in frozen. That's something that investors are looking at, and that was something that our investors got excited about when they looked at our numbers."
🧐 Noteworthy
☑️ Startup Vow has become the first company to receive regulatory approval from Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) for its cultivated quail meat.
✋ The forbidden fruit — why black currants were banned by the U.S. government for 50 years in the 20th century, and why they may now be making a comeback.
🐄 Bezos Earth Fund and Global Methane Hub have pooled $27.4M for a new initiative which will breed low-methane livestock through natural methods to help cut agricultural emissions.
😧 How microplastics get into our food.
♻️ U.S. food recycler startup Mill has reached $20M in trailing 12-month revenue and has launched ‘Mill for Workplace’. The company’s Mill Food Recycler is a kitchen appliance that turns food scraps into a dried, ground material calles ‘Food Grounds’ which can be used as garden soil nutrition or as chicken feed.
Mill
🏪 FoodFacts has been selected by Svensk Dagligvaruhandel (The Swedish Food Retailers Federation) to deliver climate scores for the entire food assortment of the Swedish grocery retail sector.
🇹🇿 While the Mediterranean diet has been held up as a model of nutrition, some researchers say the traditional cuisine of the Chagga people in northern Tanzania might be superior — it’s mainly plant-based and contains ancient grains, many probiotic-laden fermented foods, as well as polyphenol-rich fruits and vegetables.
👩🚀 Scientists have fermented miso, the cherished Japanese condiment, on the International Space Station — the first time ever that food was fermented in space.
🌍 News from the FoodTech Weekly community
🤝 Ahead of the HackSummit in Lausanne, Planetary is organizing a tour of their mycoprotein production plant in Aarberg on Wednesday May 14 (RSVP here) — and Swiss biotech Cosaic (fka Cultivated Biosciences) is hosting an open day of their lab and more in the Zurich area on May 13. Here’s an overview of all side events.
🎤 Alex Shandrovsky asked six of AgriFoodTech’s top investors at FutureFoodTech San Francisco to share their real talk on everything from downrounds, investor communications, trust, founder cold outreach, storytelling, and much more. They didn’t hold back.
Want to share some FoodTech news/project with other FoodTech Weekly subscribers? Hit reply.
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🎲 Random Stuff
🐺 The first howl of a dire wolf in over 10,000 years — Colossal Biosciences has brought back two wolves from extinction using genetic edits derived from a complete dire wolf genome, found in fossils dating back 11,500 and 72,500 years. I first saw and heard Colossal on stage at HackSummit NYC back in December and was blown away (btw, join me at HackSummit in Lausanne next month to experience more breakthrough startups and technologies).
🤓 People still use typewriters (h/t Nordic9).
👀 Forget the horse whisperer, the next big thing is Karis Dadson, the pig starer.
🚲 Before bicycles appeared in 1817, the average distance between birthplaces of married couples in England was just one mile. The bicycle dramatically expanded our genetic diversity by enabling people from different villages to meet and marry (h/t Kyle Westaway)
🪰 A single dose of new drug nitisinone can make human blood lethal to mosquitoes for up to five days (h/t Azeem Azhar).
🧀 Last week I wrote about the recently launched breast milk-flavored icecream. FTW reader Anders E. reached out to mention that breast milk cheese is also a thing.
I love you.
Daniel
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🎵 This issue was produced while listening to Ma Meilleure Ennemie by Stromae, Pomme, Coldplay, Arcane, Elyanna, and League of Legends.
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