By Mingxiu Cai Reading time: 10 minutes

Food tech is a transformative sector that shapes human health.

And in today’s world of overwhelming food choice, an increasing overlap between food and medicine, and the huge demand for high-protein food, we wanted to know: what are the big areas of investment and startup activity in the space?

Plus, we revisit the 2025 Hello Tomorrow Summit panel ‘Shaping Food Innovation in the One Health Era’, where our panel of founders and investors explored where advanced science and engineering are contributing to healthier food products.

What are ‘healthier food products’?

Here, we mean food products and ingredients designed to support general wellbeing or provide specific, science-backed health benefits, with their functionality powered or enhanced by innovative food technologies.

Looking back: Healthy food investment in the last 5 years

Things shot up in 2021. We saw a record-breaking year for global VC funding across all sectors. Healthy food, as part of the broader ‘wellness tech’ wave, benefited from this surge in capital and heightened consumer focus on health during the pandemic.

However, the landscape shifted dramatically after 2021. Rising interest rates, inflation, and the end of cheap capital made investors more cautious.

Healthy food startups are often capital-intensive and slower to generate returns, so naturally become less attractive to investors than faster-scaling sectors like AI. Additionally, a lack of strong exit opportunities (IPOs, M&A) led to investor fatigue. Without clear paths to ROI, even the most promising startups found it harder to secure funding.

Despite this challenging environment, 2024 saw a modest rebound, driven by a more selective investment approach. VCs began backing a smaller number of stronger, more differentiated players, particularly those innovating in areas like biotics, precision fermentation, and personalised nutrition. Investment activity is largely driven by European government bodies such as the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty and EIT Food, or leading VC funds like Healthy Ventures.

Looking forward: 2026 investment trends

Capital remains constrained. But food innovation, including healthy food tech, continues to be a strategic priority in 2026 for both investors and corporations.

Why?

– The market potential is promising. The global food tech sector is still projected to grow at around 10% annually through 2030

– Deep tech innovations are driving systemic shifts in how we grow, process, and consume food. Even amid reduced VC activity, high-impact technologies, from AI to biosolutions, continue to attract capital. Investors are increasingly prioritising scalable, real-world solutions aligned with health and climate goals

– Consumer demand for healthier, more sustainable products remains resilient even amid inflation. Surveys show that over 80% of consumers in key markets continue to prioritise wellness in their food choices

So, what will the future of healthy food look like?

Our 2025 Summit panel explored three key trends: Precision nutrition & AI, future of protein, and food as medicine.

In 2021, we saw a peak in these three key innovation areas, followed by troughs for proteins and food as medicine, and an uptick for precision nutrition & AI.

What caused these fluctuations? Let’s take a closer look.

Trend 1: Food as Medicine 

The concept of ‘food as medicine’ is usually considered in two ways: for chronic disease prevention, and for supporting longevity and overall wellness. 

While the concept of leveraging food for health is nothing new, its potential as a scalable, VC-backed industry segment is only now being realised.

The smaller VC investment amount is driven largely by regulatory hurdles, the need for clinical validation, and more cautious commercialisation strategies as it is still a young sector. For instance, most of the dealflow is concentrated in early-stage investment around the pre-seed phase.

Although with a smaller ticket size than other sectors, investors’ interest in food as medicine still exists; 25.7% of food-as-medicine startups receive funding, exceeding the rate for ‘general healthy food’ (15.7%).

What’s next for food as medicine?

First, the existing investor interest is likely to encourage more startups to adopt new solutions and strengthen their scientific validation. However, food as medicine startups require a longer runway as compared with traditional food tech startups; typically 3—6 years to reach the next stage, rather than 2—3 years. As more startups advance to late stage, the sector will gradually mature and is expected to generate greater investment and market traction. 

And from the solutions provided by newly funded startups, we already see other avenues being explored such as female health, cognitive health, and gut health.

We also see breakthrough ingredients emerging, including bioactive peptides, novel prebiotics, probiotics, and postbiotics, opening up new opportunities to this category. For example, 20–30% of GLP-1 users experience significant setbacks after discontinuing the drugs, highlighting the unmet need for complementary, food-based or microbiome-focused interventions. 

One startup leading the way in this space is Nutritas, an Ireland-based startup. They use AI and genomics to discover, produce, and validate plant-based bioactive peptides with targeted health benefits, and raised $42 million Series C in December 2024.

Trend 2: Future of protein

Protein technology spiked in 2020—2021 with massive funding into alternative proteins, such as plant-based proteins, cultivated meat, and precision-fermented ingredients. This surge was driven by climate concerns, early consumer excitement (e.g. Beyond Meat IPO in 2019) and hype around feeding 10 billion people sustainably. 

However, this sector is capital-intensive, faces concerns around nutrition and bioavailability and scale-up challenges, and has seen consumer demand stagnate in recent years, leading to a sharp drop in investment post-2021. 

Is alternative protein just a hype?

The answer is probably no. From a macro perspective, the sector is generally moving toward broader regulatory acceptance. But progress remains uneven, with some regions prioritising local industry protection or food security over rapid adoption.

With these challenges and hurdles, innovation pioneers are working on novel solutions on the science and technology side. For example, new protein sources, such as microbes, are being explored by innovators. Notable startups include Quorn, Solar Foods and EVERY Co.

On the commercial side, to compete in B2B ingredient markets, protein tech companies are exploring ways to be cost-competitive and meet volume demands. For example, Oobli focuses on sweet proteins via cost-effective precision fermentation paired with strategic B2B partnerships, allowing CPGs to enhance or replace traditional sweeteners and achieve scalability.

And what’s next for alternative proteins? It’s time to stop thinking of alternative protein as a replacement or something that’s battling conventional food.

Instead, the industry needs a reset that is grounded in reality. That means focusing less on big promises and more on real world problems: what the market actually needs, what customers are willing to pay for, and how to work with, not against, existing food systems.

Trend 3: Precision nutrition & AI

Precision nutrition & AI receives the largest VC funding compared with the future of protein and food as medicine, especially from 2020 onwards.

This space includes high-capex AI platforms, data-driven diagnostics, digital health tools, and even wearable integration, often with broader applications beyond food (e.g., health, fitness, biotech). It attracts both tech VCs and health and longevity-focused funds, expanding the capital pool. It is also perceived as scalable and tech-enabled, with potential for SaaS-like margins, platform effects, and exit opportunities. Companies like ZOE (personalised gut nutrition), and January AI have raised large rounds because they promise precision, personalisation, and recurring data.

Although some doubts have been raised with overreliance on algorithms or an incomplete data ecosystem, personalised nutrition still matters with the rise of Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), findings of new bioactive ingredients, and enhanced integration of AI and biomarkers.

VC interests are strong and resilient in this sub-sector. As per April 2025, a significant amount of investment ($1.9 billion) falls into advanced solutions focusing on chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular (as per Dealroom data).

What’s next for precision nutrition & AI?

In the short term, some precision nutrition startups may struggle because they often resemble digital wellness apps rather than true science-driven platforms. Lacking robust clinical validation, proprietary datasets, or defensible IP, they risk being seen as generic lifestyle tools rather than credible health solutions. This weakens their consumer engagement beyond the initial novelty.

However, in the long-term, success can come from companies that integrate multi-omics data, biomarker tracking, and personalised functional ingredients, while precision nutrition is ready to merge with therapeutic food tech and longevity biotech. 

A 101 for staying competitive in the one health era

Despite a tougher funding climate post-2021, healthy food tech remains a long-term growth opportunity (~10% CAGR to 2030), with deep tech driving systemic change in proteins, biotics, and precision nutrition. 

We think the next 5 years will look like this:

– For food corporations, the priority will be choosing strategic battlegrounds through long-term foresight and integrating innovations into pipelines to stay competitive. Building open innovation structures designed for startup collaboration is also essential

– For food startups, technical moat is more crucial than ever, meaning differentiation depends on clinical validation, defensible IP, and cost-effective real-world applications rather than hype. And scaling will increasingly depend on corporate partnerships

– For investors, expectations need to shift toward patient capital, with value concentrated in scalable, science-backed solutions supported by clearer exit pathways

At Hello Tomorrow Consulting, we partner with corporations to turn deep tech into real business opportunities, supporting with new market entry, foresight & trends analysis, startup sourcing, corporate venturing strategy, and more. 

Interested in working with us? Get in touch. 

Or, if you’re a founder of a deep tech startup, apply to the world’s longest-running startup competition, the Hello Tomorrow Challenge. 

This article was based on the panel ‘Shaping Food Innovation in the One Health Era’ at the 2025 Hello Tomorrow Summit, with Ali Morrow (Partner, Clay Capital), Katelijne Bekers (Co-Founder & CEO, MicroHarvest), Manuella Cunha Brito (Senior Investment Manager, Mudcake), and Mariette Abrahams (CEO & Founder, Qina).