Hi there,

Steve here. If you're heading to Chicago for IFT FIRST, skip the trade show mixers for dinner with the FTW community. Sebastian Zaera (CEO & Co-founder, BioBlends) and Bryant Williams (CEO, Nurtured Nuts) will be co-hosting an Investment Climate Dinner on Tuesday, July 14th. Like all IC Dinners, this one’s for founders and operators only. Get all the details and RSVP here.

This week's rundown:

🧪 The Protein Brewery raises €18M despite an FDA setback
🐟 Wildtype aims to deliver its cultivated salmon direct to consumers
🍺 Toast this 4th of July with George Washington's own 1757 beer recipe

Today’s newsletter was sent to {{active_subscriber_count}} subscribers. Welcome to FoodTech Weekly.

🇳🇱 Netherlands — The Protein Brewery raises €18M (~$20.5M) [Alternative Proteins] Fresh off EU Novel Food clearance for its mycoprotein, the Dutch fermentation startup is using this sizable Series B extension to scale production capacity and push into European sales this quarter, while funding regulatory filings in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India. Its US GRAS notice hit setbacks earlier this year; resubmission is targeted for Q1 2027. Lead: ABN AMRO Sustainable Impact Fund. Follows: Invest-NL, Novo Holdings, Madeli, Brabant Development Agency (BOM).

🇸🇪 Sweden — Wayout raises SEK 26.6M (€2.42M / ~$2.6M) [Water]
The Series A extension closed oversubscribed by SEK 10.6M as Wayout exits years of technology validation into commercial deployment. The round follows the appointment of Nestlé Waters' former Middle East & Asia CEO as working chairman. It will fund the industrialization of its containerized microfactories, which purify and mineralize water from almost any source. Investors: undisclosed.

🇺🇸 USA — Frozen One raises $5.75M [CPG/F&B]
Austin high-protein ice cream that closed this seed less than a quarter after a $2M March round — and pulled in serious operator firepower (COO ex–Van Leeuwen, sales chief who built Onnit pre-Unilever) to attack a protein-ice-cream category projected to hit $4B by 2030. Lead: Brand Foundry Ventures.

🇬🇧 UK — Fieldwork Robotics raises £2.5M (~$3.4M) [AgTech]
The University of Plymouth spin-out whose robot "Alpha" — four arms, a patented inflatable gripper, AI 3D-vision ripeness detection, built with Bosch — is already picking raspberries stocked in Sainsbury's, M&S and Waitrose, and sold as harvesting-as-a-service against the UK's ~90,000-picker labour shortage. Lead: SEED Innovations (chaired by Jim Mellon). Grants: £1.7M from Innovate UK.

🇬🇧 UK — Oat Cult raises £220k (~$280k) [CPG/F&B]
First outside funding round will scale Oat Cult’s Amazon presence, subscription business, and new flavor development. Subscription conversion for its live-culture overnight oats grew from under 4% of orders last autumn to around 70% of new customers subscribing on first purchase. Lead: Anotherway Ventures.

🇨🇭 Switzerland — OneSoil raises €1M (~$1.08M) [AgTech]
Zurich’s satellite-ag platform already boasts 1.16M users and ~4% of the world's cropland with Corteva, BASF, Cargill and Bayer as clients. The follow-on raise from existing investors injects fresh capital into "AI Agronomist," a multimodal agent trained on its own imagery since 2017. Investors: Melnichek Investments, Almaz Capital, PortfoLion, Bulba Ventures.

This week, Alex Shandrovsky had conversations with:

🤖 Liron Yanay, CEO of AgriPass Robotics, an innovative agtech startup that recently closed a $7.5M Seed round. Liron details their journey from their initial pre-seed and matching grants with the Israel Innovation Authority to locking in Harbor Venture Consulting and E44 Climate as key institutional backers. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

💸 Arnout Dijkhuizen, Principal at Rockstart, discusses Rockstart's €100k–€150k pre-seed checks into 15 AgriFood startups a year, and why founders with real domain expertise can go from first meeting to term sheet in weeks. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

🎥 You can catch both conversations on YouTube as well.

🐠 Wildtype launched a Kickstarter to sell its FDA-approved cultivated salmon lox direct to US consumers for the first time. This comes alongside the rollout of a salmon-cell-derived skincare line, following similar forays into cosmetics by Umami Bioworks and Bluu. Fish skin has never sounded so good.

🌱US non-profit Food System Innovations' new $2M Data Garden turns duplicated ingredient testing into shared infrastructure, giving alt-protein companies standardized performance data on plant proteins instead of each having to run the same validation work independently.

🐟 Bayou Best Foods acquired German startup BettaF!sh, pairing its US plant-based shrimp foodservice network with a European plant-based salmon and tuna line, and setting up cross-market distribution on both continents.

🇯🇵 Japan drafted a ¥9.7T (~$60B) public-private investment roadmap through 2040 for FoodTech, with indoor farming taking the largest share at ¥4.6T, as part of a wider 17-sector industrial strategy.

🥩 Beyond Meat brings its whole-cut mycelium steak filet to retail after the product topped sales on the brand's direct-to-consumer site since its October debut. The launch comes as Beyond works to stem a 15% revenue decline and a 20% volume drop from Q1.

🔬 Brevel and Coffeesai are partnering to test whether Brevel's light-based fermentation platform, built for microalgae, can grow coffee plant cells at commercial scale.

🌍 Turns out you don't know your neighbors as well as you think, at least not on climate. The national gaps between what people personally believe and what they guess everyone else believes are consistently dramatic.

🍺 A 269-year-old beer recipe, handwritten by George Washington, is now on tap in NYC.

🤖 The twilight of the chatbots?

🍜 South Korea's newest food delivery app: all the dopamine, zero delivery.

We love you.
Steve, Ilkka, and Alex

- - -

🎵 This issue was produced while listening to Tezeta by Hailu Mergia & The Walias Band

By Steve Edgerton, Ilkka Taponen and Alex Shandrovsky.
Did someone forward this email to you? Subscribe here.

Disclosures | Boring disclaimer