🔮 Here are DigitalFoodLab's 7 predictions for 2025:
1️⃣ We don’t expect any significant bounce back or venture creation in funding in 2025.
2️⃣ Relatively high inflation rates will weigh heavily on key FoodTech categories.
Plant-based sales improved slightly in 2024, but if inflation remains high, notably in the US, we don’t anticipate a return to high-growth rates before the end of the year.
We expect that alternative proteins, more generally, will have another challenging year as they still can’t prove a road towards price parity.
3️⃣ This context will create opportunities for some well-positioned players all along the food value chain:
- AgTech as a whole should do great, notably agriculture robots.
- Applications of Food Science beyond food should become a theme, notably in categories such as materials (packaging, textile,…) and cosmetics.
- B2B applications (notably for alternative proteins) around healthy ingredients should perform well.
4️⃣ We expect high uncertainty around an evolving regulation for alternative proteins and an increasing number of controversies.
5️⃣ We expect large agrifood businesses to keep moving towards a “venture clienting” open innovation model, hence being less involved with early-stage startups. This means more partnerships with mature startups matching identified needs and much less support for younger ventures.
6️⃣ New extreme climate events will create new hypes: as it was the case in 2024 for cacao and coffee, climate events in one corner of the world can make prices skyrocket and create the conditions for the emergence of innovations creating alternatives.
7️⃣ 💉🧑🌾 🤖 Health, regenerative agriculture and AI will remain the main themes of the year, but we expect that the focus will move from discovery to application. We expect that we’ll go beyond discovery this year and be much more focused on implementing strategies.
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