All PFN ARTICLES

What’s needed is a bold, structured, sovereign-aligned trans-Tasman alliance: AgAlliANZ, a joint food future built not on competition, but on co-creation.

The bestselling author of Diet for a New America and co-founder of the Food Revolution Network has died, aged 77, from complications of post

Forget faux beef and alt-dairy drops for a moment. The real food revolution is quietly unfolding across Ethiopia’s wheat plains, Zimbabwe’s resettled farmlands, and the Caribbean’s import-slashed shopping lists and none of it is coming from Silicon Valley or European biotech labs. It's seen as the global south's quiet rebellion.

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.

Two Chinese nationals have been charged by the FBI after attempting to smuggle a dangerous fungus into the United States. Not just any deadly wheat virus in the form of a mould - Fusarium graminearum, the crop-wrecking culprit behind Fusarium Head Blight. This isn’t a garden-variety contaminant. It’s a pinkish, spore-spewing agri-menace capable of decimating wheat, corn, barley and rice...

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.

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.

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.

“Truth is, I didn’t like the taste of the fruit,” says Satish Kumar, Principal Scientist for Tree Crops at Plant & Food Research New Zealand (Shown left), with a smile. “And that gave me a challenge - could we improve it (the dragonfruit)”