All PFN ARTICLES

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

China has just made one of the biggest protein calls of the decade and barely anyone outside the industry has clocked it. The National Health Commission has approved mycoprotein (Fusarium venenatum) as a new food raw material for the first time, thanks to an application by Jiangxi Fushine Biotechnology.

Did you know China is now sitting on 10,000–15,000 hectares of G3-type gold kiwifruit, all descended from stolen New Zealand genetics? Most shoppers haven’t a clue. They just see sweet, gold-fleshed fruit and buy whatever looks good and a huge chunk of that “gold kiwi” is Chinese, not Zespri. Quiet, massive, and maturing fast, China’s shadow G3 world is now too big to ignore.

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.

What’s really at play here is a shift in how fresh produce reaches Asia’s growing middle class: farm-to-feed-scroll. Chilean cherries have long relied on logistics and Lunar-New-Year gifting culture; now they’re adding algorithms. For the AG2, grown in Chile’s Colchagua Valley and rooted in 1950s Californian genetics, TikTok isn’t just an ad channel, it’s the market itself.

Back in the 1870s, a Chinese immigrant named Chew Chong was foraging black fungi in Taranaki and shipping them by the tonne to China. (Depiction shown below) The fungus? Hakeke. Known to the rest of the world as Woodear mushroom. Today, more than a century later, New Zealand’s long-forgotten export hero is suddenly back in fashion, everywhere but in the Land of the Long White Cloud.

Think the Chilean cherry industry had hit rock bottom? Think again. Just when growers thought they’d survived a brutal season of oversupply