Startups Still See A Future In Familiar Foods Made With Weird Ingredients
Summary
For evidence, go to most American grocery stores and youll see shelves stocked with stuff like oat milk, cashew yogurt and cauliflower pizza crusts.But judging from the ranks of funded food startups, this trend is far from over. If thats not enough, you could try filling up on fungi-based yogurt, or banish hunger pangs with air-derived protein.And those are just a few of the dishes startups are cooking up often with large servings of investment capital on the side.In the past few years, companies focused on familiar foods made with novel ingredients have raised billions in venture funding. While plant-based and cellular meat attracts the most coverage, other food categories have also attracted hefty financing.To get a sense of where capital is flowing of late, we put together a sample list of 15 companies funded in 2023 and 2024 that aim to change how we eat.Collectively, companies on our list have raised over $2 billion to date to transform substances like fungi, algae and air into things we might want to eat.Several particularly intriguing rounds closed quite recently.Just last week, for instance, Onego Bio, based in Helsinki and Silicon Valley, picked up $40 million in Series A funding to manufacture egg protein through precision fermentation.Onego describes its offering as a sustainable replacement for chicken eggs. It markets an ingredient called Bioalbumen that it says has identical taste and nutrition to chicken eggs but can be produced with a far smaller environmental footprint.With cocoa prices recently hitting record levels, chocolate replacements are also of greater interest. It sounds, um interesting.Another well-funded upstart, Brooklyn-based Magic Spoon, now sells its reduced carb and sugar versions of popular breakfast cereals at chains like Walmart, Target and Kroger.