Hi there,

Ilkka here: Last week, we shared an article about how and why the insect-as-feed industry is collapsing. While there is no denying that the industry has suffered some serious hits, it still holds its promise, and I am convinced insects will play an important role in the future, but not in the way we might have originally thought.

The matrix below shows the four sectors of insect in the food industry. In developing countries, where insects are already part of the culture, further promotion of the insect sector is well justified, but small farms are obviously not a focus for startups. The industrial sector has struggled a lot, especially on the food side, which I consider the most challenging. The industrial feed part is challenging too, but it is not dead yet. I have high hopes for Volare leading the way. They are building their first commercial site in Finland and look to open it later this year.

Daniel here — we experimented with publishing the full podcast interviews in a separate Wednesday edition of FTW but many of you didn’t love that. So we killed that idea.

To those of you who celebrate, Happy Easter and Happy Passover! 🐣🫓

This week's rundown:

💶 Standing Ovation bags €34M for precision-fermented dairy proteins
💰 Rumin8 scores $4.3M for methane-reducing feed additives for cattle
🌱 The first vertical farm in a U.S. prison opens

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Can we solve a 2-million-death global health crisis with better-shaped salt? Food manufacturers want to cut sodium to meet regulations, but consumers won't sacrifice that salty hit they love. LOT believes they've found the solution. By transforming standard salt into "high-aspect-ratio flakes" LOT has created a salt that dissolves instantly on the tongue for maximum flavor, reduces sodium by up to 50%, stays clean label, and costs less than complex chemical alternatives.

We've spoken to Guy Fefferman, the mechanical engineer turned deep-tech inventor at Landa Labs, to discuss how they are disrupting a $6B market using nothing but physics. Read the full interview to learn more (and why your laundry detergent might be their next target).

🇫🇷 Standing Ovation, €25M Series B + €5M debt / $34M, animal-free dairy proteins via precision fermentation. Investors: Bpifrance and Crédit Mutuel Innovation (co-leads), with Astanor, Bel Group, Seventure Partners, GoodStartUp, Big Idea Ventures, Danone Ventures, Angelor, Newtree, and Noshaq.

🇨🇦 Miraterra, CAD16M / $12M seed, high-fidelity soil measurement solutions. Investors: At One Ventures, Farm Credit Canada, iSelect, S2G Investments, and Sitka Foundation.

🇦🇺 Cauldron Ferm, $13.25M, continuous precision fermentation facility. Investors: Main Sequence Ventures, with participation from Horizons Ventures, SOSV, and NGS Super.

🇦🇺 Rumin8, $4.3M, methane-reducing feed additives for cattle. Investors: AgriZeroNZ.

🇳🇿 Scanabull, NZ$1.1M / $650k, AI-powered smartphone scanning for instant cattle weight estimation. Investors: Sprout Agritech (lead), Enterprise Angels, and Callaghan Innovation.

🇸🇪 Proteinish, SEK 5M ($530K), grant toward ‘AI-driven raw material analysis for digital twin-based food production.’ Grantor: Vinnova - Sweden’s Innovation Agency.

🇸🇪 VivoProtect, SEK 3M / $280K seed, probiotic bacteria strains for extending shelf-life and minimizing food waste. Investors: LU Innovation, LU Ventures, SLU Holding, Skåne Ventures, and angel investors.

This week, Alex Shandrovsky had conversations with:

🇳🇱 Tom Doornik, Investment Associate at Doen Ventures. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

🇺🇸 Jim Miller, President and CEO of Evergreen Select. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

🇩🇰 Jonas Ahm-Lundgren, Partner at The Footprint Firm. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

🏆 FoodTech 500 is the “Fortune 500 for AgriFoodTech”. Now, the full FoodTech 500 ranking for 2025 has been revealed — and the top 5 spots were claimed by Pairwise, 80 Acres Farms, Mycotechnology, Winnow, and Nuritas. Don’t miss the full White Paper for tons of relevant and insightful data.

💶 The Dutch Research Council has awarded €4.1M ($4.7M) to three cellular agriculture research projects looking to scale up cultivated meat and precision-fermented foods, Green Queen reports.

🥬 A vertical lettuce farm has been inaugurated at South Carolina prison, a first for the U.S. The program aims to teach prisoners skills for life and jobs.

🤝 French startup La Brigade de Véro, which delivers fresh weight-loss pre-cooked meal boxes to consumers and had a €23.2M revenue in 2025, has been acquired by Norac Foods (h/t DigitalFoodLab).

🥩 A blind test for consumers showed that Aleph Farms’ cultivated meat matched animal-based beef in taste.

✅ Cell-based cocoa powder producer California Cultured has secured its U.S. GRAS filing, enabling the company to launch its first product later this year.

💡 FoodTech500 Ambassadors weigh in on FoodTech trends, including how revenue is the new baseline for survival, how to fund your startup when VC money is holding back, companies to watch, and more.

🇬🇧 UK food supply at risk of 'catastrophic failure' by 2030. The report, originally made already in 2024 but surfaced only now in 26, says climate change, environmental decline, and geopolitical instability are putting increasing pressure on the country’s ability to produce food. It concluded there is “a realistic possibility” that by 2030 the UK’s food system — alongside water and natural ecosystems — could be “at strategic risk of catastrophic failure”. Fun times!

🐪 Camel Milk in Every Store (Offrange)

🎤 🌍 Let’s meet at HackSummit Lausanne 🇨🇭on April 22-23. Day 2 focuses on Food Sovereignty, with topics such as ingredient scarcity, supply-chain pressure, and how to scale resilient food systems. Use code FTW20 for 20% off a 1 or 2 day pass as you register.

🍫Thieves seemingly took a break, as 12 tons of Kit Kats were just stolen.

🤖 ARE YOU JUST A .md FILE? This “SaaSpocalypse Survival Scanner” will evaluate how your online service will manage against the developing AI (full disclosure: FoodTech Weekly is “Already Dead”).

❤️ More on AI. Ilkka here: A lot is happening in the AI space, as you can see also in the Funding section of our newsletter. This blog post, "What Do You Want from AI," is extremely relevant at this time of uncertainty and rapid change. "Eighty-one thousand people, in seventy languages, said roughly the same thing. Not ‘make me smarter.’ Not ‘replace me.’ Something closer to: ‘I need help, and you are what is available’.” The question that follows is not about AI.

🪑The bedroom chair you always wanted: The Laundry Chair (“A better place for half-dirty clothes.”). Join the already 1000+ people supporting this project on Kickstarter.

🐒 Pokémon Go is giving delivery robots an inch-perfect view of the world. 30 billion AR game images, which are accurate to the centimeter, are being crowdsourced from people playing Pokémon Go to build a world model.

🎸 This edition of FoodTech Weekly is already number 291. Interestingly, another Swede, along with Daniel, called Ola Englund, started publishing around the same time. Ola’s guitar vlog on YouTube also comes out weekly, and this Sunday will be the number 281. He has 939k subscribers (a few more than we do). If you are into guitars and metal music, Ola is your guy!

🛏️ Zero-effort zzz’s: We totally need this invention:

We love you.
Daniel, Ilkka, and Alex

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🎵 This issue was produced while Ilkka listened to Ikikaere by Whispered. Daniel listened to Bulletproof by La Roux.

By Daniel Skavén Ruben, Ilkka Taponen, and Alex Shandrovsky.
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