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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