All PFN ARTICLES

Pasture grown crops like Barley may soon jump from stockfeed and beer kegs into your latte glass. Scientists at Plant & Food Research are turning hull-less barley into smooth, creamy dairy alternatives - milks today, yoghurts tomorrow, with a nutty, fibre-rich profile speaking directly to oat-milk drinkers hunting for something new.

Whitworths has just dropped the UK’s first unprocessed walnut-based meat-free mince, and it’s a quiet challenge to the fake-meat aisle. Forget long ingredient lists and over-engineered soy bricks, this mince is just walnuts, lentils, and quinoa, spun into a texture that actually chews like beef. At £3.20 a pack, it’s aimed squarely at shoppers tired of the ultra-processed plant-based tag.

Plant proteins aren’t just a fringe choice anymore, they’re quietly embedding themselves in the weekly menus of ordinary Australian households. Fascin8foods’ mushroom-based FROOM™ has landed in Delidoor’s plant-based frozen meal range, now reaching families, professionals, and seniors who rely on the brand’s 12,000 weekly deliveries.

Forget bland mush in nursing homes as New Zealand’s The Pure Food Co takes its age-care nutrition smarts offshore. Its French subsidiary, The Pure Food Co France, has teamed up with healthcare giant emeis and Sysco France to deliver meals with modified textures (IDDSI 4) that look and taste like real food, not clinical slop.

The world’s biggest food fair just got a plant-and-cell facelift. Anuga’s 2025 edition in Cologne is giving prime floor space to a new 'Anuga Alternatives' hall and it’s not short of headliners. Beyond Meat and Oatly are on the list, but so too are tofu makers like Omami, algae caviar producers like Jens Møller, mycelium innovators like Pacifico Biolabs, sunflower protein players, and egg-free specialists Neggst.

It’s finally here - CowFree milk and cheese, real dairy, zero cows. Israeli based, Strauss Group and Imagindairy have pulled off what was unthinkable a decade ago - supermarket-ready milk and cheese made by precision fermentation technology, not udders. Microbes like Aspergillus oryzae now crank out whey protein 100% nutritionally identical to the cow version.

Precision fermentation just scored a $10.4 million boost from the Endeavour Fund, with AgResearch leading a five-year programme to turn pine pulp and other local side-streams into high-value food proteins and ingredients. Framed as a low-emissions bioeconomy pathway, the project is designed to convert forestry waste into scalable, export-ready ingredients that sidestep livestock emissions and feed into the next generation of sustainable foods .

Something unusual happened on UK's Ocado this August. Redefine Meat, the Israeli alt-meat brand built on chef-grade cred, surged +248% in searches week-on-week. That’s not just a blip in a vegan niche, that’s a mainstream summer signal. The reason? It was BBQ season in the UK, and shoppers wanted burgers and koftas looking, cooking, and searing like the real thing, but without the cow.

US Based, The Mushroom Meat Co. has dropped four bold, pre-seasoned flavours in the form of Carne Asada Bites, Korean BBQ Bites, Pulled Carnitas, and Southern BBQ Pulled, all crafted for chefs who need speed without compromising flavour.

Australia just green-lit Vow’s cultivated quail meat for restaurants, yet up in Queensland, the LNP is reportedly moving motions to ban cultivated meat outright, highlighting the $70-billion livestock industry's political heft.

In a move that could become a blueprint for surviving New Zealand’s tightening plant-based market, Grater Goods has officially taken Green Dinner Table under its wing. The two Christchurch-born pioneers have been running parallel tracks for years - Grater Goods with its artisan plant-based deli and products, Green Dinner Table with its chef-designed weekly meal boxes.

In a move signaling both conviction and disruption. Food Frontier returns to Sydney with AltProteins 25 on Tuesday, 14 October 2025 at the Sofitel Wentworth marking its shift from Melbourne and acknowledging Sydney’s growing prominence in the alternative proteins sector.