All PFN ARTICLES

The 2025 FoodTech 500 reads less like a hype parade and more like a post-mortem. Plant-based hasn’t vanished, cultivated meat hasn’t collapsed, but the centre of gravity has shifted. The companies still standing are quieter, more technical, and far less interested in convincing consumers to “change behaviour”. This year’s list rewards those building infrastructure, ingredients, and systems that slot into existing food supply chains.

Australia is ending 2025 in full identity-rebuild mode, and food is the battlefield. According to new social and search data from Pureprofile and Quilt.AI, Australian consumers are loudly declaring the future belongs to them, their producers, their ingredients, their provenance lanes, with 81% of trending sentiment fixated on "Australian-made" goods and the cultural comfort of eating from their own backyard.

Once just a squishy afterthought on a pizza or a supporting act in a stir-fry, mushrooms have gone from background noise to full-blown digital celebrity. And not just any mushrooms, we’re talking about the exotic, the shaggy, the shelf-stable, the biohacked.

And here’s a wild thought - EARTH is an anagram of HEART. Coincidence? Maybe. But let’s run with it. Because something is changing, not fast enough for the forests or the fish, but enough to whisper perhaps, just perhaps, we’re learning to eat with our hearts again. This isn’t just wordplay — it's a shift in planetary intimacy.

Wave goodbye to the pumpkin spiced latte - it's the culinary equivalent of dad jokes now. 2025 is all about bold food flavours coming with g