All PFN ARTICLES

“There’s never been a better time for ANZ artisanal food producers to enter the China market.” That’s the assessment from Iain Langridge, MD of In2AsiaExports, who has spent more than a decade helping premium international food and wine brands establish themselves across China’s fast-evolving and ever changing food landscape.

The 2025 FoodTech 500 reads less like a hype parade and more like a post-mortem. Plant-based hasn’t vanished, cultivated meat hasn’t collapsed, but the centre of gravity has shifted. The companies still standing are quieter, more technical, and far less interested in convincing consumers to “change behaviour”. This year’s list rewards those building infrastructure, ingredients, and systems that slot into existing food supply chains.

Dubai, Jan 26–30, 2026 marks the launch of Gulfood 2026, the world’s largest annual food & beverage show, bringing together thousands of global exhibitors across food categories, from traditional products to cutting-edge food tech and plant-centric innovation.

Canadian Maia Farms isn’t trying to win shelf space with a brand. It’s embedding itself inside foods people already eat. Their mushroom and mycelium ingredients are 'scaling up and are showing up' invisibly in thickening sauces, adding fibre to comfort meals, boosting protein in savoury dishes without changing flavour or texture. The consumer doesn’t meet Maia at the fridge. They meet it already on the dinner plate.

For decades, the meat industry framed alternative proteins as fringe, fake, or faddish. Now, as MEAT the book prepares to land as a top-ten Spring 2026 science release, that narrative is quietly collapsing. Written by Bruce Friedrich, Founder of GFI - Good Food Institute, the book doesn’t argue against meat consumption at all, it argues the method of producing meat is obsolete. And crucially, many of the world’s largest meat companies agree.

Japan has done it again. Not with sushi, not with matcha, but with ramen that quietly rewrites what comfort food can be. Towzen, a cult vegan ramen institution born in Kyoto, has landed in Sydney’s CBD, and the queues are doing the talking. On Kent Street, inside a 140-year-old heritage building, diners line up in the heat for bowls of soy-milk ramen that feel both deeply Japanese and unexpectedly modern.

Beleaguered Beyond Meat is no longer just trying to fix dinner with its plant-based meat, it’s coming for your drink can. The company has launched Beyond Immerse, a sparkling functional beverage line full of plant protein, fibre, antioxidants and electrolytes, positioning it as a lighter alternative to heavy protein shakes. Three flavours, two protein tiers (10g and 20g), and a limited-run release via the Beyond Test Kitchen from January 15. On the surface, it looks like inno

High-protein bread isn’t new. But high-protein bread that actually behaves like bread? That’s a different story. US based, Protein Chef’s Double Protein Bread isn’t chasing macros with bolt-on protein powders, whether from animal dairy or even next-gen precision-fermented whey. It’s quietly rewriting the rules of baking itself: two regular slices delivering 12g of protein without the dense crumb, odd textures, or “functional food” aftertaste usually defining these sorts of pr

The new U.S. Dietary Guidelines just out have done something almost unthinkable in the post-2019 food wars as they’ve re-centred red meat, dairy, eggs, poultry and seafood as primary protein sources, while quietly sliding plant-based proteins further down the nutritional hierarchy. Not banned. Not dismissed. But no longer treated as nutritionally equivalent. That alone tells you something fundamental has shifted.

Meat isn’t being replaced, it’s being re-engineered, and New Zealand is now part of that shift. Across food science, a new logic is taking hold, the future of protein isn’t “meat versus alternatives,” it’s meat plus. Hybrid protein , a blending of animal protein with algae, yeast, plants, or fermentation-derived biomass, is emerging as the most commercially realistic path to better nutrition, lower environmental load, and preserved taste. This isn’t a food trend. It’s a re

FoodTech in 2026 isn’t about who has the wildest idea, it’s about who actually shows up in food people eat. After years of hype, pullbacks and painful reality checks, a new class of companies is quietly moving ahead by doing something radical - making workable ingredients, scale, and slot into everyday products without asking consumers to change their habits.

Food waste has officially entered its protein era. Researchers publishing in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have shown that fungal mycelium grown on carrot side streams doesn’t just tick sustainability boxes and it actually tastes better than conventional plant-based proteins when turned into vegan burgers and sausages.