Hi there,

Alex here, and welcome to FTW issue #300! Coinciding with this milestone, we have some exciting news to share. It’s my pleasure to introduce our new Editor-in-Chief of FTW, Steve Edgerton. I’ll let him take it from here.

Steve here. Like many of you, I've been a reader of FTW for years. Daniel spent six years building FTW into an essential voice in foodtech, and one of my must-read newsletters every week. So it's a genuine honor to step in to carry it forward, and to support Alex as he grows FTW into a community built to help founders raise, scale, and exit.

A bit about me. I've spent nearly a decade across the food system as an operator, a writer, and a strategist. I've helped build an early-stage food waste mitigation startup, written and run communications for organizations like Food Tank and the National Farmers Union of Canada, and consulted for agrifoodtech businesses. Today, you’ll find me at the Canadian Food Innovation Network, a national non-profit that funds and supports Canadian foodtech startups as they scale and commercialize.

I consider myself a reluctant optimist. It doesn't come naturally to me, and a career in food systems doesn't make it any easier — you spend a lot of time staring at problems that feel too big to solve. Fatherhood turned me into an optimist; writing about foodtech founders every day is largely what keeps me one. Their ingenuity, their stubborn conviction that this relentlessly difficult work is worth doing, it makes pessimism feel lazy. A cop out. Championing the founders building a more sustainable, nutritious food system is what FTW has always been about, and it's why I'm glad to be here.

And, without any further ado, here is this week’s rundown:

🇩🇪 Freshflow raises $10M to fix the €200B fresh food forecasting problem.
🌬️ Solar Foods brings CO2-derived protein to the US for the first time.
🍅 A brief history of throwing tomatoes at people.

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🇺🇸 USA — The Ryl Company raises $20M [CPG/F&B, Nutrition]  The $4.5B canned-and-bottled tea category shrank 1.8% last year. Ryl grew 157% in it, on zero-sugar positioning and owned DSD distribution. The round funds continued retail expansion and new product development. Lead: Purchase Capital (via Ryl Growth Partners SPV)  Follows: N/A  Source: Food Business News

🇺🇸 USA — Jesse & Ben's raises $10M [CPG/F&B]  The anti-seed-oil wave has reached the freezer aisle. Jesse & Ben's beef tallow fries are outselling legacy brands two years in; this round funds supply chain scale and grocery expansion. Lead: Greycroft  Follows: Rich Products Ventures, Willow Growth Partners, Sling Ventures, Midnight Venture Partners, grt sht ventures + founder/creator angels (Poppi, Sweetgreen, Hu, Orgain)  Source: Food Business News

🇩🇪 Germany — Freshflow raises $10M [SaaS/Software, Agtech, Waste/Circular]  Roughly a third of the fresh food European grocers buy (€200B+ a year) is binned thanks to forecasting tools built for shelf stable SKUs. Freshflow's AI platform is built for perishables, and this raise funds expansion into meat and bakery categories and new European markets. Lead: Reimann Investors  Follows: Capnamic, Caesar, World Fund, Venture Stars, Catatumbo Capital + new IBB Ventures, Cindy Beckel  Source: ESG Today

🇬🇧 UK — Lune & Wild raises £2M (~$2.7M) [CPG/F&B, Nutrition]  Lune & Wild's chef-led clean-label children's meals have doubled revenue annually and sold over a million meals in the past year. Production scale and retail expansion are next, starting with a recent Ocado.com listing. Lead: Guinness Ventures  Follows: Dr Rupy Aujla, Doug Struthers + existing investors Charlie Gardiner, Siân Parry Jones, Harry Bloice  Source: FoodBev

🇺🇸 USA — VitaHustle raises growth equity (undisclosed) [CPG/F&B, Alt Proteins, Nutrition]  Functional nutrition + celebrity distribution is now a PE growth-equity target. The better-for-you shake category is maturing toward consolidation as wellness heads toward $1T.  Lead: Axum Capital Partners  Follows: N/A  Source: Business Wire

🇳🇱 Netherlands — New Dawn Bio raises €2.1M (~$2.3M) [Cell Ag, Other]  Cell culture is moving past food into materials. New Dawn Bio grows real wood from tree stem cells in bioreactors in the final shape needed, no sawing required, at up to 80% lower COGS — opening a biomanufacturing market well beyond the plate.  Lead: CapitalT  Follows: Norrsken Evolve, Ontdekkers Group + angel Jelle Prins  Source: Tech Funding News

🇧🇪 Belgium — B-COS raises €1M (~$1.1M) [Fermentation, Crop Science, Agtech]  Since 2009 the EU has pulled ~50% of approved synthetic pesticides, and the biologicals that remain are dogged by inconsistency. B-COS uses precision fermentation to produce crop protection bioactives with pharmaceutical-grade batch-to-batch reliability, with an early discovery program already underway with Nichino. Lead: AIF + VP Capital  Follows: Biotope by VIB; VLAIO (grant)  Source: World Agri-Tech

🇳🇴 Norway — Monil raises $10M [Agtech, SaaS/Software]  Virtual fencing is crossing into a crowded US market and the value is shifting from the fence to herd-health data — heat and calving alerts now on the same collar. Monil has sold 50,000 collars across Norway, Sweden, and the UK, grew revenue 5X last year, and is opening a Kansas City subsidiary to compete for US beef producers. Lead: Firda  Follows: Core Eqty + other Norwegian VCs  Source: Beef Magazine

🇧🇪 Belgium — Borro raises €1.3M (~$1.4M) [Waste/Circular, SaaS/Software]  Borro makes reusable-cup deposits painless at stadiums: cups link to a visitor's bank card and the deposit auto-refunds on return. As EU reuse rules bite, the durable asset is the payment and data rail, not the cup. The raise funds expansion into the Netherlands, Germany, and France this summer, with PSG's Parc des Princes already lined up. Lead: N/A  Follows: Seeder Fund, imec.istart, PMV, BlueSnipe, GS1  Source: EU-Startups

🇪🇺 EU — PROSCALE secures €6.99M (~$8M) [Alt Proteins, Fermentation, Waste/Circular]  Brussels is funding the unglamorous half of fermentation protein: turning cheap food-industry sidestreams from potato, wheat, and baking residues into single-cell protein, targeting a 10x jump in fermenter capacity.  Funder: Circular Bio-based Europe JU (+ EU STEP Seal); VTT-coordinated, 17-partner consortium incl. Tetra Pak, Barilla, Wageningen  Source: Protein Production Technology

🇺🇸🇮🇱 US / Israel — Ayana Bio & Brevel net $1.25M [Fermentation, Cell Ag, Nutrition]  Plant cell culture lives or dies on scale economics, so the field is hunting new yield levers, like Brevel's "illuminated fermentation" (LED light as an elicitor inside the tank) to lift bioactive output. MAHA's scrutiny of synthetic preservatives like BHA is pulling interest toward natural alternatives like sage-derived rosmarinic acid.  Funder: Israel–US BIRD Foundation (royalty-repayable)  Source: AgFunderNews

Note: MD of FTW, Alex Shandrovsky, is the Director of Strategic Partnerships at Ayana Bio.

This week, Alex Shandrovsky had conversations with:

🌎 Charles Pontvianne, CFO of Planetary, a Swiss biotech startup that recently announced a massive 16 Million CHF Series A co-led by Radikal Capital and Oetker Collection KG. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcast.

💲 Amir Weitmann, Managing Partner at Champel Capital, an Israeli venture fund that deployed heavily into FoodTech across its first two funds (backing standouts like Remilk and Aleph Farms). Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcast.

🎥 You can catch both conversations on YouTube as well.

🌬️ Solar Foods' Solein, protein fermented from CO2 with no farmland required, has made its US commercial debut via Ambrosia Collective's Planta brand.

🧀 Formo and Those Vegan Cowboys say their jointly-filed recombinant casein is the first precision-fermented casein to reach active FDA GRAS review, with a no-questions letter expected later this year.

🌿 Kale Foods acquires Swedish plant-based meat brand Färsodlarna from Novax, adding whole-food products made from locally grown lupins, grey peas, and field beans to a consolidating Nordic platform that already holds stakes in Impossible Foods, Eat Just, and Heura.

🌾 Raisio is putting €4.5M toward extracting functional fibre from grain processing waste, part of a 16-member national consortium worth €12M total.

🗑️ ReFED and The Spoon's new report on AI solutions for food waste finds that measurement and forecasting tools are delivering ROI in commercial settings, while agentic and generative AI largely hasn't yet.

🍝 Barilla wants to put your foodtech solution to work. Its Good Food Makers program co-develops and pilots startup solutions across its global operations. Applications open until July 10.

🌱 A long read for the weekend: how the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh built the world's largest natural farming program, 1.8 million farmers deep.

🐱 Cats, famously easy to please, preferred cultivated hamster meat over conventional chicken in a blind taste test.

🍅 A brief history of throwing tomatoes at people.

🥬 South Korean researchers found that a kimchi-derived probiotic binds to nanoplastics in the gut and helps flush them out.

⛱️ How about a planetary sunshade?

🐮 Turns out cows know exactly who you are.

We love you.
Steve, Ilkka, and Alex

- - -

🎵 This issue was produced while Steve listened to Open Eye Signal by Jon Hopkins.

By Steve Edgerton, Ilkka Taponen and Alex Shandrovsky.
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