All PFN ARTICLES

The oat milk disruptor has just dropped its Spring/Summer 2025 Lookbook, and it’s serving glossy, food-forward, Glossier-adjacent realness with names like Smokey Matcha, Maple Miso Latte, and, because why not, Tomato Vine Soda Float.

They say the functional drink space is saturated—but Ārepa just proved there’s still room at the top for a product that delivers more than just hype. This week, co-founder Angus Brown confirmed Ārepa’s signature Brain Drink has held the title of #1 top-selling functional beverage in Woolworths New Zealand’s chilled section for a full 52 weeks and counting.

It started with lettuce. Now it’s flowers. Wonky Box New Zealand, the quirky produce disruptor known for rescuing twisted carrots and freakishly large parsnips, is turning its attention to the blooms we gift, grieve with, and guiltily forget to water. Emerge 'Wonky Flowers'!

So here we are. The future just swam onto your dinner plate and all without fishing nets, mercury warnings, or eco-guilt. Wildtype, the San Francisco cultivated salmon start-up with a with serious a sushi-grade ambition, has just scored a historic FDA thumbs-up to sell cultivated salmon across the United States. Yes, that’s right, salmon grown in a lab, not the ocean. No sea lice, no overfishing, no drama.

Welcome to Erewhon, Los Angeles’ cathedral of curated wellness, where celery juice is religion and the home of a single $20 strawberry. Yes, one strawberry. Not dipped in gold, not encrusted with edible diamonds, just a very red, very round, very Japanese strawberry, padded in plastic and treated like it’s on loan from the Louvre.

Let’s cut to the chase, naming your product in the alt-protein sector isn’t a branding decision, it’s a survival strategy. Get it right, and you’re dinner-table royalty. Get it wrong, and you’re just another cardboard-textured meat clone haunting the bottom shelf.

The country’s leading grower of tropical plants and fruits, Exotica is fast becoming a poster child for weather-smart food innovation. Their secret? A mix of horticultural hustle, zero compromise on quality, and a product range reading like a tropical tasting tour for the senses: freeze-dried dragonfruit, botanical extracts, mango spice cubes, and a sugarcane juice so fresh it practically hums.

Singapore-based TurtleTree has officially secured regulatory approval in the United States for LF+, its precision-fermented version of lactoferrin, a dairy-derived protein with cult status in the wellness scene for its immune-boosting, gut-balancing, inflammation-smashing abilities.

They used to say a Perrier bottle was the height of European sophistication, green glass, tight bubbles, and a whiff of French prestige. But now? It’s starting to smell more like cover-up than class act.

It’s taken years of plant-based flops, fridge disasters, and rubbery regrets, but at last, science has served up plant-based dairy-free cheese wheels that grill, melt, stretche and brown. Cue applause from every lactose-intolerant millennial who still remembers the trauma of early cashew 'cheddar'.

Forget feedstock, New Zealand’s kiwifruit rejects are being stitched into a very different future. At the centre of it all is KiwiLeather Innovations, a next-gen biomaterials company quietly turning over 50,000 tonnes of orchard discards into a new kind of plant-based leather.

If you’re still scanning supermarket shelves for inspiration, look no further than a converted convent outside of Melbourne, where the Foodpreneurs Festival cracked open a six-pack of future food brilliance. From umami-packed vegan mayo to Mediterranean spritzes and spreadable butter without the cow, the inaugural BiteBack Awards weren’t just about startup sparkle, they showed exactly where the food system is headed.