#269
Hi there,
🕯️ Irina Gerry passed away this week. She was a leading voice and source of inspiration for thousands of people in the food innovation ecosystem. I had the privilege of engaging with her, including in person, over the past several years. Our thoughts are with her family during this difficult time.
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Björn Öste cofounded Oatly with his brother Richard in 1994. By the time the company IPO’ed in 2021, it had $600M in annual revenue — today it’s north of $800M. This week, Aventure, the R&D food venture studio they founded, was declared bankrupt, with Björn citing a tough funding environment.
Sorosh Tavakoli co-founded Videoplaza in 2007; it was acquired in 2014 for around $75M. Yesterday, he announced that plant-based cheese startup Stockeld Dreamery — which he co-founded in 2019 and raised $20M+ for — is shutting down. Green Queen and AgFunder both published candid interviews with Sorosh on the closure.
I was an early angel investor and advisor to Stockeld, joining full-time in 2021 and leaving in 2023 when the company moved to New York. When I first joined, I wrote: “Change doesn’t just happen. The future is shaped by highly motivated people who want something very much.”
That paraphrase of John W. Gardner still resonates. Right now, online commentators are quick to mock Stockeld’s closure — the investors, the team, the thesis, the strategy. Some critiques may hit the mark. Others miss it entirely. Mistakes were made. But real change never comes from standing on the sidelines. It comes from those willing to take risks and push forward anyway.
That’s why I admire people like Björn and Sorosh. They’re not perfect. They don’t always succeed. But they put it all on the line to challenge the status quo — to try building a better future.
It’s also the reason why I enjoy covering the FoodTech/AgTech innovation space — constantly learning about new technologies, startups, and entrepreneurs who are innovating and working hard to build a better food system, for the benefit of all of us.
This week's rundown:
🧀 Nutropy raises €7M to scale precision-fermentation casein
🥼 Allergen Alert nets €3.6M to commercialize portable allergen and gluten detector.
🍌 Tropic Biosciences develops first CRISPR-edited banana in 75 years that resists browning
Let's go!
💰 Funding
🇫🇷 Nutropy has banked €7M ($8.1M) to scale precision-fermentation production of animal-free casein proteins and launch what it calls a “cheese-able milk” powder by 2027, offering a plug-and-play ingredient for dairy alternatives. The round was led by Big Pi Ventures and Zero Carbon Capital, and joined by e.g. Big Idea Ventures, Novax, and cheese producer Paul Dischamp.
🇫🇷 Allergen Alert, a deep-tech startup creating a portable device to rapidly detect food allergens and gluten, has closed a €3.6M ($4.2M) round led by Demeter and bioMérieux with support from Bpifrance and private banks, to accelerate product development, industrialization and pre-sales (h/t DigitalFoodLab)
🇰🇪 Farm to Feed, which tackles post-harvest food loss by rescuing “imperfect” produce and supplying it to commercial kitchens and institutions, has secured an investment (sum undisclosed) from Mercy Corps Ventures. Farm to Feed sources harvested fruits and vegetables that would typically be discarded due to appearance, aggregates them via its digital marketplace, and sells to B2B buyers—thus boosting farmer incomes, reducing food waste, and cutting emissions from landfill.
🇩🇰 MATR Foods, which uses solid-state fermentation to turn legumes and grains into what it calls ‘meat successors’, has raised €40M ($47M). )The round combines an equity investment from Novo Holdings and EIFO with debt from the European Investment Bank. MATR plans to build a 4,000 ton production facility in Jutland, Denmark, operational by 2027. 
MATR Foods
🎙️ Investment Climate: Robin Jansson, CEO & co-founder of Sonicflora, on how to get funded in 2025
This week, Alex Shandrovsky met with Robin Jansson, CEO and Co-Founder of Sonicflora, the startup building the world’s first bioacoustic plant database—using ultrasound “stress” signals from plants (like dehydration, pests, or disease) to monitor crop health in real time. Sonicflora recently raised SEK 2.7M (~€250K) led by Almi Invest, after turning an early rejection into a “yes” by reframing their story from a research project to a scalable ag-data platform. Bootstrapped nights and weekends, the team has also secured €550K in grants from AgTech Sweden and the Swedish Board of Agriculture, giving them a two-year runway to scale their plant-sound database. With partnerships at SLU and leading horticulture hubs, Sonicflora is proving how plant acoustics could redefine precision agriculture.
The conversation can be found on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Top three findings from this conversation:
From “Hard No” to “Yes” via a Sharper Story. Refining the pitch from research-y to venture-scale unlocked the round. Robin reframed Sonicflora as a scalable data/AI company, which reopened a passed investor and converted: “They actually wanted to pass on that opportunity. So that was back in February. But then I actually met a colleague of his, and actually by then, we had changed our pitch just a little bit, and what we were doing and what we were planning to do. I actually convinced her to take a meeting, and then we had a meeting, and the journey just continued. It was quite a journey just to go from a quite hard no to a maybe to a yes.”
The Big Vision: A New Data Layer for Agriculture. Sonicflora isn’t a sensor widget; it’s building the world’s first bio-acoustic plant database so growers can detect stress (dehydration, pests, disease) early via ultrasound signatures. “We are building the world’s first bioacoustic plant database. Plants emit sound and ultrasound… when they’re being stressed. We… analyze them and train our machine learning models.”
Valuation Discipline: Dilution Guardrails Drove Target. They reverse-engineered valuation from needed cash and dilution bands (15–20%) using early benchmarks, keeping founder ownership healthy for future rounds.
🧐 Noteworthy
💶 EIT Food has awarded €600K ($700K) to 18 AgriFoodTech startups across Europe via its Next Bite 2025 program. Funding has ranged from €20K to €50K per company and aims to accelerate product development and market readiness.
🧬 Why Nigeria accepted GMO’s — long weekend read from Asimov.
😵 South African insect ag startup Inseco has ceased operations and sold its assets after facing prolonged power outages, scaling challenges, and investor fatigue. The company which was founded in 2018 and raised a $5.3M Seed round in 2022, struggled with recurring four-hour power cuts, which disrupted production and damaged customer relationships. Inseco fed organic waste to black soldier fly larvae, which were then turned into feed for pets, poultry, and aquaculture.
🍌 Scientists at U.K. biotech firm Tropic Biosciences have used CRISPR gene-editing to produce the first commercial banana variety that resists browning (it’s also the first new banana variety in 75 years). By disabling the enzyme polyphenol oxidase (PPO), the new banana stays creamy-yellow for up to 12 hours after peeling — a potential game-changer for the banana supply chain, which loses as much as one-third of its produce to waste.
Tropic Biosciences
🌍 News from the FoodTech Weekly community
👨🏻💻 Bärta (🇸🇪) is “looking for a hands-on COO to join as employee number two – someone who thrives in the chaos (and magic) of startups and knows their way around the food industry. You’ll help us scale production, operations, and partnerships as we grow from proof of concept to full-scale movement. More than experience, we’re after the right mindset: curious, driven, and ready to build something truly new from the ground up. Contact Desirée Lundberg.”
🏆 Applications for the 2025 FoodTech500 are open! Learn more and apply.
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🎲 Random Stuff
🍄🟫 Training for 'mushroom consultants' is in high demand in Sweden (h/t Martin Weigert).
🐮 More and more cows wear high-tech collars, so that farmers get actionable data to help improve cow health (and productivity…)
🌎 Only one country in the world produces all the food it needs, a new study has found.
🛄 Pets on flights can be classified as baggage, the top EU court has ruled.
🚫 Why some bars are (successfully) banning phones (in related news, kids without phones in U.S. schools are behaving like drug addicts).
👑 Thailand is hosting beauty pageants for buffalos.
I love you.
Daniel
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🎵 This issue was produced while listening to May I Have This Dance by Francis and the Lights.
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