Future Food Quick Bites: Vegan Holiday Meals, Cultivated Leather & Cheap Alt-Milk

In our weekly column, we round up the latest news and developments in the alternative protein and sustainable food industry. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers a new oat milk dessert brand, Next Level Burger’s holiday feast, and price parity for plant-based milk.

New products and launches

Discount retailer Aldi has introduced its largest vegan Christmas range in the UK, including a plant-based version of its footlong pig in blanket, a sprouted gratin, a nut roast, a brie and butternut wellington, and a dairy-free cheese board.

Fish-free seafood maker Aqua Cultured Foods has landed on the menu of Chicago eatery Mama Delia, owned by Michelin-starred chef Marcos Campos Sanchez. The dish, called Atún Crudo, features the vegan raw tuna topped with a fried egg and potato strings.

If you’re after oat milk desserts, Kaiser is a new brand by Canadian oat farmer Nathan Kaiser. The company has introduced a bunch of ice cream tubs and bars, all but one of which are vegan. They’re available at select grocers in Quebec and will enter the Greater Toronto Area later this year, before a national rollout in 2025.

Oatly has signed a multi-year deal with UK café chain Black Sheep Coffee, which will serve its barista oat milk as the default dairy alternative across its 100 stores.

Mushroom meat maker Myco has struck a deal with Brakes, the UK’s largest wholesaler, to supply burgers, sausages and mince – made from vertically farmed oyster mushrooms – to the latter’s 20,000+ clients.

And vegan fast-casual chain Next Level Burger and its subsidiary Veggie Grill have introduced a take-home Holiday Feast menu, which features its Holiday Harvest wellington and five sides. Each $130 set feeds four to six people and requires a 72-hour notice, with the option to add dessert.

Company and financial updates

Swiss cultivated meat startup Sallea, which has created edible scaffolds for manufacturers to produce whole-cut meat and seafood from animal cells, has raised $2.6M in a funding round led by Founderful.

London-based New Wave Biotech has won the €20,000 EIT Food Accelerator Network Tech Validation Award to validate its technology with research organisation CPI. It has created an AI-powered software to help precision fermentation companies optimise their downstream processing.

Fellow UK company Vegan Food Group has sold the Weisbaum production facility it acquired in the takeover of Tofutown earlier this year to another German tofu producer, New Originals Company. It will allow the firm to focus on scaling up at its larger plant in Lüneburg.

At British meat-free brand Gosh Foods, sales decreased by 7% in 2023, mostly from declines in Europe, with pre-tax losses widening from £1.3M to £3M.

Meanwhile, Framptons, another UK plant-based company, has reported a profit of £1M for the financial year ending April 2024, overturning a £3.7M loss from the previous year. It comes after its acquisition by German investment firm Profura. The manufacturer launched the Wessex Oat Company in July.

Dutch crop solutions provider AgroSpheres has closed a $37M Series B round to scale up its AgriCell technology, which protects active ingredients in pesticides from environmental pressures, and bring its biopesticides to market.

Also in the Netherlands, Qorium, led by Mosa Meat founder and cultivated meat pioneer Mark Post, has produced a 35x35cm sample of cultivated leather using a newly scaled-up tissue bioreactor.

Massachusetts continues to invest in the future of food, awarding $2.1M to the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture to establish the Foodtech Engineering for Alternative Sustainable Technologies (FEAST) centre, which will advance cultivated meat R&D.

Agricultural giant Royal Cosun has invested $3.5M in Planetary to scale up the development of cost-effective ingredients derived from fermentation, convert the former’s feedstock into mycoprotein ingredients, and create new applications for plant-based food.

Policy, research and awards

The Vegan Society’s VEG 1 Baby & Toddler supplement, a liquid multivitamin for children aged six months to four years, has won a three-star rating in the supplement category of the 2024 Nourish Awards.

In the Netherlands, plant-based milk is almost at price parity at Lidl (where dairy is only six cents cheaper) and Aldi (a 16-cent difference), according to research by animal rights organisation Wakker Dier.

Japanese researchers have conducted a life-cycle assessment of IntegriCulture’s serum-free, food-grade culture media for cultivated meat, revealing that electricity, animal inputs and single-use items like “lab consumables” were the main emissions hotspots.

Finally, is our brain chemistry to blame for the climate crisis? That’s the perspective of a new white paper, which suggests that humans are hardwired to desire status (which translates to material wealth and consumption), and dopamine continually craves greater rewards.

Check out last week’s Future Food Quick Bites.