Food tech trends rising and declining: overview
- AI increasingly connects R&D data, improving innovation and decisions
- Cultivated meat investment fell sharply as scale economics struggle
- Gene-edited NGT-1 crops face lighter rules, aiding commercialisation prospects
- Plant-based meat sales grew as products improved health positioning
- Clean-label demand rises while vague sustainability claims are scrapped under stricter regulation
If a week is a long time in politics, a year is even longer in technology. What’s considered cutting-edge today can quickly become adopted or disappear altogether. Few innovations stay new for long.
In food tech specifically, many trends that once seemed revolutionary have already faded from view, replaced by the next wave of innovation.
So what food tech trends have been growing? And which are seeing a decline?
Growing: AI in R&D
AI has long been used in R&D, helping manufacturers develop new product ideas and making the process of ideation more efficient. Yet now, it’s taking a more comprehensive role, suggests Ewa Granosik, CEO and managing director at agritech consultancy Bright Green Partners.
AI can be used to connect previously fragmented parts of R&D data, she suggests, such as ingredients, consumer insights, formulations, sensory results, and scientific literature. These can be used to help teams make better decisions across the entire innovation process.
Competitive advantage within the next two to three years will come not simply from using AI, suggests Granosik, but in how effectively companies structure their knowledge and integrate AI into decision-making.
Platforms used by companies such as NotCo, IFT and Turing Labs have already started moving in this direction, she says. Meanwhile, majors like Nestlé are integrating machine learning and predictive analytics into R&D workflows.
Declining: Mass market cultivated meat
The cultivated meat sector continues to struggle, and there is little sign of a new dawn.
According to the think-tank The Good Food Institute (GFI), cultivated meat companies only raised $73.9m (€66m) from investors in 2025, compared to $144m (€128.7m) in 2024.
Cultivated meat has made some technical and regulatory progress, but problems with production efficiency, scale, profitability and consumer acceptance continue to dog the sector, says Bright Green Partners’ Granosik. The regulation situation is, despite progress, still a major bottleneck as well.
“Cultivated meat is not disappearing, but expectations are shifting from rapid mass-market disruption toward narrower applications and commercialisation strategies with clearer near-term economics.”
Potential to grow: Precision-bred crops’ move towards commercialisation
In the EU, gene editing has long been held back by regulatory roadblocks. Gene edited crops were required to submit an extensive risk assessment before market authorisation. That is, until now.
The EU has created a two-tier system, relaxing regulations on certain gene-edited crops developed by new genomic techniques (NGTs), whilst keeping regulations the same for others.
One category of crops, NGT-1s, will no longer face the same strictures. To fit this category, crops must have a limited type and number of changes that could have occurred through conventional breeding, and must contain no genetic material outside the gene pool that was available through conventional breeding. Meanwhile, NGT-2s are more complex and do not fit these parameters. NGT-1s will be regulated like conventional plants, whilst NGT-2s will retain the complex GMO regulation.
This opens the door for precision-breeding techniques such as gene editing to become more mainstream.
“The next two to three years could see precision breeding move much closer to mainstream food and ingredient supply chains because it offers a faster route to traits with direct economic value, including resilience to pests and disease, improved composition and other agronomic characteristics,” says Bright Green Partners’ Granosik.
She caveats this by pointing out that, as the new framework does not apply until July 2028, it won’t be until then that the full impact of the changed rules will make itself known on the market. Therefore, this trend is not technically growing, but it does have the potential to grow.
Declining: Vertical farming at a commodity scale
Vertical farming has seen better days. A range of big names have gone under, including Infarm, Agricool and Jones Food Company. Some consider the sector a failure. There are a range of reasons that vertical farming has struggled. One, in Granosik’s view, is simply economics.
“The economics of using expensive indoor infrastructure to compete with conventional agriculture remain challenging, with recent research continuing to identify energy use, labour and capital expenditure as major constraints.”
Vertical farming still exists, she says, but it is only used in areas where the additional cost can be justified, such as leafy greens and other high-value produce.
“The vision of vertical farms replacing conventional production of commodity crops is fading,” says Granosik.
Growing: Plant-based meat
There are some signs that plant-based meat may be recovering, after seeing a squeeze in recent years. According to data from analytics company Euromonitor International, sales of plant-based meat and seafood substitutes grew by 8.1% between 2024 and 2025.
There are a few reasons that plant-based meat may be on the up. On the one hand, the price of conventional meat is rising, Granosik points out. On the other, weaker plant-based products are being scrapped and companies are moving towards a broader health positioning.
Plant-based meat is also seeing a shift away from pure meat mimicry towards products that use whole foods more extensively. Numerous brands, including This, Beyond Meat, and Moving Mountains, have embraced the trend.
The category is broadening, focusing on health and ingredients like fibre and protein as well as taste and value. This, says Granosik, could mean an expansion of consumer use cases.
“We are starting to see signs that plant-based meat is slowly exiting the trough of disillusionment.”
Declining: Dedicated alt-protein facilities
Conversely, companies are moving away from dedicated alt-protein manufacturing facilities.
Several such facilities have become “underutilised or uneconomic”, says Granosik, while scale-ups are beginning instead to leverage third-party industrial capacity.
Companies are more likely to scale through contract manufacturing, sharing infrastructure and repurposed assets rather than making commitments to dedicated capacity, she says.
However, dedicated facilities will not disappear. They “still make sense where utilisation and demand are proven, so this is a decline in the default scale-up model rather than in manufacturing investment itself”.
Growing: Clean-label reformulation as a ‘technology mandate’
Clean label products have long been demanded by consumers. Yet now, clean label is a “technology mandate”, says Granosik, with companies reformulating whole portfolios at an unprecedented rate.
While clean label itself is not new, she points out, the “speed and scale of portfolio reformulation” it is driving is. For example, in the US, many portfolios are quickly shifting from artificial to natural food colours.
This clean label revolution creates opportunities in food tech, she says, especially in areas such as sweetening systems, natural colours, texture, preservatives, flavour masking and processing technologies.
Such technologies aim to “allow companies to simplify labels without compromising taste, appearance, shelf life or cost”.
Declining: Insect protein megafarms
Insect protein is hardly a booming sector. Many ventures based around insects, such as Ÿnsect, ENORM, and the UK restaurant Yum Bug, have shut up shop. Furthermore, consumers still appear to be disgusted by insects.
So it should perhaps come as no surprise that industrial-scale insect farms are on the decline. Yet the struggles of insect protein are not only related to consumer demand, but economics as well.
“The industrial megafarm model looks increasingly difficult to justify with high capital requirements, challenging unit economics and uncertain end-market demand making further large-scale capacity expansion hard to support,” says Granosik.
Energy intensity, scaling challenges and production costs continue to restrict the success of insect protein.
Growing: Demand for nutrient density
The demand for products rich in functional ingredients, especially protein and fibre, is not new. But it shows little sign of stopping, suggests Granosik.
The popularity of GLP-1s is accelerating the demand for nutrient-dense products. Manufacturers are responding in kind, aiming to create products fit for GLP-1 users.
Meanwhile, beverages are being developed that are not only rich in protein and fibre but with hydration and gut health benefits as well.
This trend is not going anywhere any time soon. “We expect ‘nutrient density’ to increasingly influence mainstream formulation, rather than remaining a specialist sports-nutrition or weight-management proposition,” says Granosik.
Declining: Vague sustainability claims
Vague sustainability claims are expected to decline, in no small part due to the implementation of the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition directive, known as EmpCo, in the EU. The regulation means that companies can no longer make claims without backing them up.
As a result, companies have already started dropping claims, according to Thijs Geijer, sector economist for food and agriculture at ING Bank.
“It might appear that companies are more inclined to greenhush, but that could very well be reaction to new regulation.”
This will likely impact food tech as well, suggests Bright Green Partners’ Granosik.
Food tech propositions will need to have specific or measurable consumer or supply chain value to comply, rather than simply using general sustainability language as its primary selling point.
“Sustainability itself is not declining; what is declining is companies’ freedom to use sustainability as a vague, unquantified marketing claim.”
