Future Food

Welcome to the third edition of the Future Food News Review, with foodtech, agtech and food systems' leading journalists. This week's headlines were: Amazon's new private label food brand Aplenty, US government climate policies for agriculture, a $40bn SPAC for Southeast Asia delivery startup Grab, Increased funding to plant-based startups is not cutting meat consumption, Food workers are still getting Covid-19, Restaurants break up with single-use plastic, Mushroom-sourced bacon raises $40m, Hazard pay and grocery store closures.

Welcome to the second edition of the Future Food News Review! This week's top headlines included: plant-based meat maker Impossible Foods' rumored $10bn IPO, a Japanese company's launch of a gene-edited tomato, an in-depth look at vegan cheese, the potential for solar panels to improve the productivity of farmland, a major restaurant tech acquisition, celebrities investing in bottled water and the romanticization of America's agriculture history.

Roberta Barbieri is VP of Global Water and Environmental Solutions at PepsiCo. We dig into the corporate's January announcement that it will have net-zero emissions by 2040 and reduce its absolute emissions 40% by 2030.

The weekly Future Food News Review features leading journalists in foodtech and agtech sharing and discussing their top headlines of the week, hosted on Clubhouse.

Continuing on from the theme of what I missed while I was off on maternity leave at the end of 2020, the industry had a major announcement and that was when Eat Just, the company first known for its plant-based egg-less mayo, was the first company in the world to get regulatory approval for cell cultivated meat and to serve it in a restaurant. It managed to do this in Singapore with its cultivated chicken product, which it served to children in the form of chicken nuggets. So in this episode, I speak to Josh Tetrick, founder and CEO of Eat Just.

Indoor agriculture is a competitive space. While there is so much whitespace for vertical farms and hi-tech greenhouses to grow and sell produce into local food systems across the globe, those that are venture capital-backed have been fighting for investor attention for years with lots of big announcements often lacking substance. But who is really leading the race?

The time for automation in food and agriculture is now. But are the robots ready to be unleashed?

Covid-19 started in Asia, and the region was the first to feel the social and economic impacts of the disease as it spread worldwide. It’s also where businesses, entrepreneurs, investors, and governments have spent the most time dealing with Covid-19 and its effects. Their insights and experience – and the strategies they’ve adopted to ride out the pandemic – could prove invaluable to agrifood players not just in Asia, but elsewhere in the world, too. This is the recording of our second webinar.

Covid-19 started in Asia, and the region was the first to feel the social and economic impacts of the disease as it spread worldwide. It’s also where businesses, entrepreneurs, investors, and governments have spent the most time dealing with Covid-19 and its effects. Their insights and experience – and the strategies they’ve adopted to ride out the pandemic – could prove invaluable to agrifood players not just in Asia, but elsewhere in the world, too. This is the recording of our second webinar.

In this episode of Future Food, which I co-hosted with my wonderful colleague Lauren Stine, our reporter and resident rancher, we talk to Lew Moorman and Nick Honegger of Soilworks, a newly-created investment group focused on regenerative agriculture. Nick and Lew founded SoilWorks after working together at Scaleworks, the B2B SaaS focused investment organization founded by Lew.