From AI-powered product development and digital consumer twins to microbiome innovation and precision fermentation, a new generation of start-ups are tackling some of the food and beverage industry’s biggest challenges.
FoodNavigator speaks to eight emerging companies about the technologies driving their business, and the opportunities they see shaping the future of food.
Meet the start ups
- Comet Clinical: Remote, decentralised trials
- Digitaste: Digital twins for EU consumers
- Key2Biotics: Translating probiotic and microbiome science
- Snap2Cook: AI powered food decision platform
- Zolvia: Bioavailable, soluble, stable ingredients
- Quartz Labs: AI-powered product innovation platform
- Eclipse Ingredients: Precision fermentation for infant nutrition
- Fabas: Functional protein ingredients
Comet Clinical: Remote, decentralised trials
Q: What does your Comet Clinical do?
A: Comet Clinical helps food, nutrition and ingredient companies generate credible human evidence for their products without the cost and complexity of a traditional CRO model. We design and deliver clinical, remote and real-world studies that help companies substantiate health benefits, strengthen claims and give customers and commercial partners evidence they can actually use.
Q: How can remote and decentralised clinical trials change the way food, nutrition and supplement companies generate scientific evidence for products?
A: Remote and decentralised trials can make human research significantly more accessible to the food and nutrition industry. By taking studies into participants’ everyday lives, we can recruit more broadly, collect real-world data through validated questionnaires, wearables and at-home sampling, and reduce the infrastructure and cost associated with traditional site-based trials.
Q: What makes your approach different from existing solutions?
A: Our studies are senior-led, pragmatic and designed around the evidence a company actually needs rather than automatically defaulting to a large, expensive clinical trial. We combine decades of clinical research experience with remote technology and flexible study designs, allowing us to move quickly and scale the approach to the scientific and commercial question.
Digitaste: Digital twins for EU consumers
Q: What does Digitaste do?
A: Digitaste is a sensory AI company. Our flagship product TasteNET is a consumer simulation platform where F&B brands test concepts, formulations and launch strategies against more than 110k AI digital twins of real consumers.
TasteNET enables brands who ask, “who will love this, who won’t, and why?”, to form a bottom-up approach at any stage of new product development.
Q: How could your AI consumer digital twins technology transform the way brands make innovation and launch decisions?
A: Digital twins enables a brand to test a concept, or a full range, against a virtual consumer population, segmented by taste type, food personality and different demographic dimensions. It allows brands to get a sense of acceptance or rejection – and the reasons behind both in minutes rather than months.
TasteNET reaches 86% fidelity with real consumer responses in backtesting, validated across more than 20 benchmarks of consumer decision moments. The biggest value is the why: because each twin carries a modelled episodic affective flavour memory, it surfaces the subconscious drivers that people rarely articulate, yielding 2.4 times more actionable insight than human respondents alone.
Why is Future Food-Tech London an important event for your company?
It brings together exactly the people we build for: brand innovation leaders, flavour and ingredient houses and investors asking how AI changes the economics of product development. London is the right place to meet partners who want to localise digital twins for European consumers and run pilots with us.
Key2Biotics: Translating probiotic and microbiome science
Q: What does your Key2Biotics do?
A: Key2Biotics helps brands translate probiotic and microbiome science into scientifically credible, commercially viable products. We bridge the gap between science and the realities of bringing a product to market, from selecting the right strains and ingredients through formulation, stability, regulatory considerations and manufacturing.
Q: At the intersection of microbiome science and product development, what opportunities do you see for translating microbiome research into mainstream consumer products?
A: The opportunity is moving beyond digestive health into areas such as healthy ageing and longevity, metabolic health, gut-brain health and even nutritional support alongside the rapidly growing use of GLP-1s.
We are also seeing exciting opportunities around next-gen probiotics, postbiotics and microbiome-targeted fibres. The real opportunity now is to take these rapidly evolving areas of science and translate them into credible, convenient products that consumers can incorporate into everyday life.
Q: What does success look like for Key2Biotics over the next 12 months?
A: Success over the next 12 months is continuing to build out our Scientific and Formulation Innovation Centre and expanding the range of microbiome technologies and product formats we can work with.
A key focus is expanding further into functional F&B, where incorporating probiotics and other microbiome-targeted ingredients brings a very different set of formulation, stability and manufacturing challenges.
Snap2Cook: AI powered food decision platform
Q: What does Snap2Cook do?
A: Snap2Cook is an AI powered food decision platform that helps people decide what to buy, use and cook based on the ingredients they already have, alongside their health, dietary and budget needs.
Using a photo, voice or text, our proprietary technology identifies ingredients and connects users with personalised meal plans and more than 18,000 recipes, including over 7,000 health focused options.
Q: What does the future of personalised food decision making look like to you?
A: The future is about creating one connected system that understands the whole person and their household, rather than requiring several disconnected apps.
Our new Snap2Health feature connects an AI personal trainer directly with Snap2Cook. Users can enter their fitness goals, dietary requirements, food allergies and existing injuries once. That information is then shared across the platform, allowing Snap2Cook to build meal plans around their health and fitness targets while Snap2Health creates a more appropriate exercise programme.
Q: Why is Future Food-Tech London an important event for your company?
A: Future Food-Tech London brings together the retailers, food companies, investors and technology leaders shaping the next generation of the global food system.
Snap2Health will launch shortly before the event, giving us the opportunity to demonstrate and showcase the feature working live inside Snap2Cook. Delegates will be able to see how personal fitness goals can connect with ingredient recognition, personalised meal planning, nutrition and food waste reduction within one platform.
Zolvia: Bioavailable, soluble, stable ingredients
Q: What does Zolvia do?
A: Zolvia is a formulation technology platform that solves the delivery problem for functional ingredients. Many proven bioactives underperform in finished products – they’re poorly absorbed, unstable in liquid formats or degrade during processing.
Zolvia work at the formulation layer to make ingredients more bioavailable, soluble and stable, so manufacturers can build functional products that actually deliver.
Q: How could advances in ingredient delivery unlock the next generation of functional F&B?
A: The gap in functional F&B is delivery – absorption, stability, solubility. Close it, and the whole category levels up: brands can make claims they can genuinely stand behind, at doses that make commercial sense, in formats consumers actually enjoy.
Q: What makes Zolvia’s approach different?
A: Two things. First, we’re a technology platform, not a single-ingredient supplier – the delivery system works across many bioactives, so we’re solving a category-wide problem rather than selling one SKU.
Second, we validate with human clinical evidence, not just lab data. Our lead ingredient, z-curcumin, showed 71 times greater bioavailability versus standard curcumin in a human clinical trial – a result which is unusual for a company at our stage.
Quartz Labs: AI-powered product innovation platform
Q: What does Quartz Labs do?
A: Quartz Labs is an AI-powered product innovation platform built specifically for food and beverage teams. F&B companies don’t lack ideas or data. The problem is that knowledge is fragmented, teams are siloed, and too many promising ideas take months to validate, or never move forward. We built BOX OS to solve this, it connects market signals, company knowledge and specialist AI to help teams find the right opportunities and turn them into validated, feasible product concepts much faster.
Q: How will AI change F&B product development?
A: We’re in the Humagentic age: companies are adopting AI, but fully agentic flows are still far away. The temptation to throw AI at problems is high. AI can reduce the time it takes to bring a product to market. Teams can spot opportunities, explore concepts, check feasibility and test assumptions before committing significant time and money, allowing for smaller teams and portfolios tailored to micro-niches.
However, this can only happen under two conditions:
- AI needs the right context and knowledge of a company’s unique constraints
- People need to be onboard, not feel threatened by AI, but empowered by it
AI will not replace food scientists, marketers or innovators, it will give them more capacity and better evidence for making decisions.
Q: What does success look like over the next 12 months?
A: Success means proving repeatable value with F&B teams: helping more customers bring stronger ideas to market faster; converting early projects into long-term partnerships; and becoming the trusted AI layer within existing innovation processes.
Eclipse Ingredients: Precision fermentation for infant nutrition
Q: What does Eclipse do?
A: Eclipse uses precision fermentation to change that. The first ingredient we’re making is human lactoferrin, a protein naturally produced by the body, with applications spanning women’s health, sports nutrition, longevity and infant formula.
Q: How are precision fermentation and bio-identical human proteins shaping the future of infant nutrition and functional food innovation?
A: Human proteins, like lactoferrin, are designed for human biology. They’re made to do exactly what our bodies need, from regulating iron and fighting pathogens, to supporting gut and immune health.
For infants specifically, we can help bring infant formula closer to the gold standard of mother’s milk. This means babies get access to compounds equivalent to those naturally found in breast milk, with lactoferrin among the most abundant.
Q: What makes your approach different from existing solutions on the market?
A: For the first time, we are raising the ceiling on decades-old fermentation technology, underpinned by two proprietary synbio platforms and applied AI, built in from day one.
Millions of data points have already been captured, growing with every experiment we run. The result is a compounding advantage, where platforms get stronger, and every ingredient gets to market faster and cheaper than the last.
Fabas: Functional protein ingredients
Q: What does Fabas do?
A: Fabas develops functional protein ingredients from pulses, particularly faba beans, for plant-based and hybrid dairy applications. We help manufacturers create products with better taste, texture and nutritional value while using their existing dairy-processing infrastructure
Q: How do you see bean- and pulse-based ingredients reshaping the future of dairy innovation?
A: We believe pulses will allow dairy innovation to move beyond a simple choice between conventional dairy and fully plant-based alternatives. The challenge is to make pulses easy to process industrially so they fit into existing dairy infrastructure. By solving this at the ingredient level, dairy manufacturers can use their current capabilities to create everything from yogurt and milk to cheese – either plant-based or hybrid. Rather than replacing dairy, pulses give the industry an additional platform for innovation.
Q: Why is Future Food-Tech London an important event for Fabas?
A: This year is particularly important because we are entering the commercial scale-up phase. We want to build relationships with dairy and food manufacturers, identify strategic production and ingredient partnerships, and connect with investors who understand the timelines and impact potential of B2B food technology.
It is also an opportunity to contribute to the wider conversation about the next phase of plant-based innovation – one focused less on hype and more on quality, industrial readiness and products that consumers genuinely want to buy again.
Experience the innovation first-hand
These start-ups highlight the breadth of innovation on display at Future Food-Tech London. While their technologies vary, each is focused on solving real industry challenges, whether improving product development, strengthening scientific evidence, advancing nutrition or unlocking new ingredient opportunities.
Register now to connect with the people and ideas shaping the next generation of food innovation.
