One week in a post #48: Plastic Fights, Ultra-Processed Inconsistencies, Green Ammonia, Pet Foods.
Food and climate highlights on my radar!
[Three pieces of news]
🛑 Coca-Cola, Nestlé and Danone accused of misleading
Environmental and consumer rights organisations have filed a legal complaint against food and drink giants for the use of misleading ‘100%’ recycled’ and ‘100% recyclable’ claims on plastic water bottles sold across Europe. The point made is that those claims may mislead consumers into viewing single-use plastic bottles as “sustainable”, recycling can never address the scale of the plastic pollution crisis, and bottles bearing “100% recycled” are never entirely from recycled plastic in the EU. As Luc De Vallieres puts it: “Please stop making your consumers responsible for the end-of-life of your products”.
⚔️ The ultra-processed food fight
You know — I’m very interested into this topic! Chris Bryant recently wrote a piece on “ultra-processed foods” (a term from the NOVA classification system foods) and a fascinating paper was published on Nature last year. Both are hitting some interesting points.
The system is unclear and the examples are many. For instance, yogurt is classified as a NOVA1 food (non processed), despite containing ingredients characteristic of NOVA3 (made with non-alcoholic fermentation) and NOVA4 foods (casein, lactose, whey), which would make it “ultra-processed”.
Partially blind view: While nobody talks publicly about Brie or Parmigiano being “ultra-processed foods” (which they would be by the NOVA definition), animal-free dairy product are often referred as such. And why none refer to vitamin D pills or baby formula as “ultra-processed foods”?
We’re witnessing an oversimplification. What’s the value of grouping foods based solely on processing levels?
🐶 Cultivated meat for pets in EU (+ comms reminder)
Great news — the Czech start-up Bene Meat Technologies (BMT) has obtained registration from the European Feed Materials Register to develop cultivated meat for cats and dogs. The company claims to be the only entity in the world that can produce and sell this product for the pet food market. I got personally very confused by the initial use of the word “approval” while then turning it into “registration”. It seems clear that they did not get an approval, which means they cannot sell their cultivated right now. But they might be the closest one to eventually get it — which is awesome! While celebrating this progress, this is probably a good reminder for all of us in novel industries to be extra-careful about not exposing ourselves to possible misinterpretations, as it’ll hurt the whole space: hopefully the Upside case on Weird thought us something.
[Three raises]
🌾 Rice / CarbonFarm Technology closes $2.6m to decarbonize rice through satellite-verified carbon credits.
🍕 Mozzarella / Italian Dreamfarm foods raises €5M for fermented vegan cheese.
🌱 Ammonia / Talus announced a $22 million Series A to ramp up production of its green ammonia technology.
[Three products]
🫖 Pluck / Tea blends with chai spices and upcycled cocoa shells.
🍝 Matriark / Pasta sauces from farm surplus and fresh-cut remnants.
☕ Etelmento / Circular Coffee Tasting Boxes featuring cascara cola and moka spent grain granola.