All PFN ARTICLES

Juicy Marbles built its reputation on theatrical, whole-cut plant-based steaks, the kind designed to be carved, shared, and Instagrammed. Now the company is deliberately stepping down from the dinner-party pedestal and into everyday eating, launching its new Umami Burger across 225 UK Tesco stores.

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.

Kimchi has always been more than a side dish. For centuries it’s sat at the heart of Korean food culture, not as a “superfood”, not as wellness theatre, but as a daily, living eco-system of nourishment. Now, science has finally caught up. A new clinical study from South Korea’s World Institute of Kimchi reveals kimchi doesn’t just “boost” immunity, it fine-tunes it.

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.

Italy has spent centuries defending how food should be made and now it’s quietly experimenting with how food might be printed. In Abruzzo, researchers at ENEA’s EltHub are using 3D printing and lab-grown plant cells to create edible “inks” shaped into sliced foods and steak-like cuts. This isn’t novelty gastronomy, it’s applied food engineering, designed around texture, nutrition, and accessibility.

A major analysis of more than 30,000 brain scans has reignited concern about ultra-processed foods (UPFs), linking heavy consumption to cognitive and neurological risks. But as the story ricochets through mainstream media, a familiar distortion is taking hold: plant-based foods are being swept into a problem they didn’t create and don’t own.

ALDI UK is quietly doing what many plant-based brands keep promising but have not yet delivered: making meat-free eating genuinely affordable. Just ahead of Veganuary, the UK grocer has expanded its Plant Menu private-label range with a Vegetable Burger, Vegetable Popcorn Bites and No Chicken Pieces, all landing at £1.99 and hitting shelves from 30 December 2025. No premium pricing. No virtue tax. Just plant-based food priced like everyday food.

Italy's cuisine has just been received an accolade even the most passionate nonna might blush over by convincing UNESCO its entire cuisine, the whole sprawling, tomato-splashed, pasta-shaped universe, deserves protection as an intangible cultural treasure. Forget individual dishes. The whole national food identity just got canonised.

US based, Brad’s isn’t just selling kale chips, they’ve built a whole new air-dried snacking category out of air-dried vegetables. Walk down a Whole Foods aisle and their wall of colour jumps out at you in the form of Veggie Flats, Veggie Chips, Keto Crisps, Snackable Salads, and yes, Crunchy Kale. It’s the clearest example yet of how “whole-veg snacking” is separating itself from the UPF-heavy alternatives dominating grocery shelves.

Plant-based food doesn’t have a taste problem, it has a perception problem, and the internet keeps proving it. A recent viral video shows a man raving about a burger, calling it “one of the best ever,” right up until he’s told it’s vegan. It wasn’t, it was beef the whole time, yet the flavour apparently changed instantly.

India’s snack aisles are mutating again and this time, they’re going fully functional - India's plant-based snack boom. Seaweed chips, protein-packed bites, and fortified mini-meals are turning up in every metro, and they’re not framed as “vegan alternatives.” They’re just… snacks. Quick, nutritious, fuss-free, and engineered for a population that lives on the move.

Here’s the thing nobody really talks about: breast milk is basically a real-time diagnostic of the human diet. The new University of Texas study showed when nursing mothers swapped beef for plant-based meat for just six days, their breast milk radically changed its fatty-acid profile showing more medium-chain fats, less long-chain polyunsaturated ones. That’s not a moral argument; that’s biochemistry. It tells us the body is a lot more “live-wired” to what we eat than we pret