Each day at 5 p.m. we collect the five top food and supplement headlines of the day, making it easy for you to catch up on today's most important natural products industry news.

3 Min Read
online grocery shopping phone
Getty Images

Kellogg inks three-year deal to provide plant-based products to Sodexo

Kellogg’s Away From Home business-to-business sales division is making its Incogmeato plant-based protein brand available to a wider audience in the hospitality sector via an expanded partnership with global provider of catering, hospitality and food retail services, Sodexo. The new Incogmeato by MorningStar Farms Burger Patties, a product that is part of the growing number of meat lookalikes popular with flexitarians, will be served at more than 3,000 locations in the U.S. Grand Rapids Business Journal reports.

More than $10B invested in grocery startups this year

Lockdowns, social distancing and fear of COVID-19 prompted record amounts of people to turn to online grocery shopping in 2020. This, in turn, has spurred record amounts of funding in the grocery startup sector. However, opportunity for online grocery is projected by experts to be far less than investor interest might suggest; sales for online grocery are already dropping in year-over-year analyses, and questions around how much vaccinated consumers will stick with these platforms in the coming months or years remains unclear. The Spoon has the scoop.

How palm oil became the world’s most hated, most used fat source

Palm oil's affordability is primarily what led it to infiltrate practically every aspect of our day-to-day lives. Unfortunately, it's cheaper than other oils as a direct result of legacies of colonialism and exploitation shape the industry today; this is also what makes it challenging to shift the crop onto a more sustainable path. Read this article on The Counter for a complete timeline of the ubiquitous ingredient from colonizers' preferred skin care add-in to today's ultraprocessed foods. The most important thing the natural products industry can take away from this issue is that consumers need to become more educated about and motivated to buy sustainably harvested palm oil.

What these vegan butchers in Minneapolis have figured out that the fake-meat giants can’t

Now that vegans and vegetarians have had a taste of freakishly meat-like meat substitutes for products such as burgers, plant-based butchers are primed to introduce even more alternative cuts of meat such as Korean ribs, Cajun jerky, porterhouses and porchetta. Fast Company interviews several key members of this movement and finds that the creativity and small-batch quality they bring to the table will be difficult for bigger brands to replicate on a larger scale. While the latter have focused on a handful of products, relentless trialing on the part of vegan butcher entrepreneurs puts them far ahead in terms of innovation.

The world's first lab-grown sushi bar is about to open in San Francisco 

Wildtype, an aquaculture startup that grows sushi-grade salmon from a small amount of fish cells in a lab setting, plans to open a sushi bar to sell its product as soon as this fall. “Global demand for seafood is outpacing supply, so the status quo needs to change. Our pilot plant will showcase the promise and wonder of growing fish fillets using cell cultivation,” Aryé Elfenbein, co-founder of Wildtype, said regarding the move. “In addition to being designed to shorten innovation cycles and facilitate the scaling of food production, the facility will be a place where the public can learn about this fascinating new technology.” Read more at Veg News.

Subscribe and receive the latest updates on trends, data, events and more.
Join 57,000+ members of the natural products community.

You May Also Like