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Welcome to VITAMIN C®
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Read time today: 2:11 min
Hi friend,
It’s Friday morning. You are reading VITAMIN C 🍋.
There are 5M+ posts this week about foodtech and food innovation. I hunted down the 5 that deserve your attention.
Here they are:
1. [Science | Report] 🌾 The pattern behind 10,000 years of food innovation
If you zoom out, food innovation follows a simple pattern.
Pressure builds.
A new technology appears.
The entire system reorganizes around it.
Neolithic agriculture created stable food supplies.
Industrialization in the 19th century unlocked scale with fertilizers and mechanization.
The 20th century optimized convenience and efficiency.
But every optimization has trade-offs.
Today, the food system generates roughly 30% of global emissions.
Animal agriculture uses about 80% of farmland but delivers a minority of calories and protein.
When systems become inefficient, new models emerge.
That’s why investors, founders, and large food companies are betting on:
Precision fermentation
Cellular agriculture
Circular production systems
Check out this infographic (created by DLG) to get the full history picture.
2. [Food for Thought] 🍣 Japan built a $90M industry from fake food
Here’s a weird business idea that worked.
Plastic food.
In Japan, restaurants often display incredibly realistic food replicas outside their doors. Bowls of ramen. Perfect tempura. Glossy desserts.
They’re called shokuhin sampuru.
The idea started in the 1920s when urban restaurants needed a visual menu for rural customers unfamiliar with certain dishes.
Show the food. Sales go up.
One entrepreneur, Takizō Iwasaki, industrialized the idea in 1932.
Today his company supplies a huge share of Japan’s restaurants. Some models cost hundreds. Premium ones cost thousands.
The entire category has grown into a ~$90M industry.
And now the replicas are spreading beyond restaurants. As art pieces, home decor or collectible objects.
Turns out people don’t just want food.
Sometimes they want the idea of food.
3. [People & Startups] 🍜 Reinventing the Noodle
Noodles… but as chips.
That’s the concept behind S’NOODS, a snack startup founded by chef Lauryn Bodden. The brand launched in 2024 and reimagines one of the world’s most universal comfort foods, noodles, as a crunchy, ready-to-eat snack.
I want to test this with my Italian father-in-law. The ultimate stress test.
Check them out here.
4. [Recommendation] 📊 The visual trick great DTC brands use
There’s a surprisingly effective ad format spreading across DTC.
I first saw it highlighted in a post by Artem Zavyalov analyzing creatives from some of the fastest-growing brands.
The format is simple: the comparison chart ad.
A bar chart
One metric (price, protein, sugar, durability)
Your product clearly winning
That’s it.
No long copy. No complicated story. Just visual proof.
It works because humans are wired to compare.
Two bars side by side and the brain immediately processes the difference.
Scan → compare → decision.
Smart brands know: Don’t just say your product is better. Show it.
5. [Fun] 😂
I saw this video on Instagram and genuinely can’t decide if it’s cute or completely absurd.
But clearly something about it works. The video has almost 1M likes.
In a feed full of perfectly styled content, sometimes the really weird ones win.
Happy Friday 13th
Cheers, Lia
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