All PFN ARTICLES

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.

China has just vaulted to the front of the global cultivated meat race with the announcement Joes Future Food has commissioned the country’s largest cultivated meat pilot plant and completed the world’s first scaled trial production of cultivated pork in a 2000-litre bioreactor. This moves cultivated pork from research curiosity toward real production models supporting massive commercialisation. Such pilot scale is rare in the global sector and signals China’s growing enginee

Victoria, Australia has just given plant-based protein a serious upgrade, opening a $12 million Plant Protein Hub and glasshouse at Agriculture Victoria’s Horsham SmartFarm. This isn’t a token ribbon-cut, it’s a fully kitted-out engine-room with shared labs, a test kitchen, analytical gear and grower access, built to turn lentils, chickpeas and field peas into the next wave of high-protein products.

If you want to know where food is really heading over the next five years, forget the doom-scroll headlines about collapsing plant-based sales. The real story is happening in fermentation tanks, mycelium reactors, lipid biodesign labs, cultivated-meat cell bays, AI flavour engines, and vertical farms pushing out produce with military precision. According to TRENOS, these 20 companies, the Global Top 20 Food-Tech Companies, are building the infrastructure of the next food syst

Here’s the strange but fascinating twist in the seafood universe right now: Atlantic Fish Co, a U.S. start-up growing fish fillets from real fish cells, is suddenly finding itself buoyed by an unexpected current from the North, Norway. Scandinavia, already one of the planet’s largest producers of wild-caught and farmed fish, is now plugging capital into the next frontier: cultivated seafood.

NXW, born in New Zealand in 2020 and now headquartered in Portugal, has achieved a category milestone with its Marine Whey™ ingredient. Together with SIG Group, they have completed their first commercial run of an affordable functional‐nutrition product for the MEA region: a UHT‐treated “Peach Power” marine whey yoghurt filled via SIG’s aseptic packaging solutions and tailored for local taste profiles.

Singapore has formally shifted to a hybrid food resilience model, blending local production with trusted imports as it pushes back its “30 by 30” target to 2035. The new plan sets 20 percent local supply for fibre (leafy greens, mushrooms, beansprouts) and 30 percent for protein (seafood, eggs), down from the once-ambitious goal to produce 30 percent of all nutritional needs by 2030. The revision reflects hard realities: limited agricultural land, high energy and labour costs

In a world of weather shocks and geopolitical tension, Cellular Agriculture Australia has thrown down the gauntlet — food isn’t just sustenance, it’s national security. Their new white paper “Made & Grown: The Future of Food Biotechnology & Biomanufacturing in Australia” argues that investing in biomanufacturing is no longer optional; it’s a sovereign imperative.

From the molecular-kitchen of Vow comes a bold leap: their gourmet brand Forged is now making cultivated quail spread accessible to consumers. After securing regulatory approval from Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) for cultured Japanese quail cells, the company is dropping a small-batch smoked quail spread you can order online—Sydney launch only.

PARIMA (France) has just become the first European company to gain regulatory approval for a cultivated meat product, its cultivated chicken, officially cleared by the Singapore Food Agency (SFA).

China’s next Five-Year Plan is shaping up less like an agricultural roadmap and more like a national tech manifesto and foodtech is suddenly in the mix. Beijing’s leadership has tied biomanufacturing to its industrial self-reliance strategy, signalling proteins, enzymes, and precision-fermented ingredients now belong alongside semiconductors and EV batteries in the country’s quest for technological sovereignty.

French cultivated-meat startup GOURMEY has just submitted the first cultivated-duck application to Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ), marking the first cultured-meat filing since Vow’s local debut. The company’s cell cultivated duck biomass (Anas platyrhynchos domesticus) is designed for foie gras and pâté formulations with a 5–80 per cent inclusion rate.