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Read time today: 2:24 min
Hi friend,
It’s Friday morning. You are reading VITAMIN C 🍋.
Welcome to the 27 new readers who signed up in the last two weeks. You are in good company.
As always I hunted down 5 insights about food trends and food business that deserve your attention.
Here they are:
1. [Science | Report] 🤝 We built the map the food sector was missing
With my work at Food Campus Berlin, I kept seeing the same thing. Startups and corporates working in the same space, barely aware of each other.
So we did something about it.
Together with UnternehmerTUM and IICM, we built the AgriFood Landscape DACH. A map of 600+ B2B actors across the full value chain (from seed to side streams) across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Who this is for:
↳ Startups looking for the right partners
↳ Corporates scouting for innovation
↳ Investors who want to understand the ecosystem logic behind individual deals
The food system is under pressure from climate, resources, and food security. The solutions are out there. They just need to find each other.
Download the full landscape here.
2. [Insight] 📈 A hot date: Dates are having a moment
What I've been observing for two years can now be summed up in one thesis.
UK online supermarket Ocado reports: Medjool dates up +100% YoY. Date butter searches up +458%. Chocolate dates up +135%. TikTok recipes featuring dates keep growing.
In Germany, the same pattern shows up in plant-based alternatives. Highly processed plant-based meat grew +0.2% in 2025. Tofu: +29%.
The pattern has now reached the snack segment. Highly processed snacks like protein pudding and fitness cereal bars are facing a counter-trend: dates.
Dates remind us that good products are sometimes just that: good products. No 47 ingredients. No functionalization. Just a fruit that was always good and is easy to snack.
More about this in The Guardian.
3. [Insight] 🍎 The fruit nobody eats
Each cashew kernel hangs from a fruit, the cashew apple.
For every 1 kg of cashew kernels that is harvested, roughly 10 kg of cashew fruit is generated. Most of it is discarded.
Akoua, a German startup, is turning this waste into business.
I tried their cashew juice last week.
The taste is acquired, it’s tropical, sweet and a little astringent. Worth knowing: cashew juice contains six times the Vitamin C of orange juice.
What I love about Akoua: It addresses healthy nutrition. It reduces food waste and emissions. And it creates real economic value in the Global South.
That’s exactly the kind of systematic shift toward circular resources I hope to see more of.
Check them out here.
4. [Insight] 🥗 They came for the soccer. They fell in love with ranch dressing.
International fans visiting the US for the World Cup have gone viral discovering ranch dressing, a US staple for decades.
There are clips of near-religious first tastes racking up millions of views across TikTok and X.
Airport security agency TSA leaned into the trend with deadpan social posts telling fans to NOT pack ranch in their carry-on luggage.
“Please avoid chugging your ranch outside security - the airlines will check it for you”.
5. [Fun] 🤓 The last cheeseburger
When Iceland’s last McDonald’s closed in 2009 following the country’s financial crash, local resident Hjörtur Smárason bought a burger and fries on the restaurant’s final day and decided not to eat them. Instead, he kept them as an experiment.
Today, 17 years later, the burger and fries appear largely unchanged.
They are on display in a guesthouse in southern Iceland, where they have become an unlikely tourist attraction and a strangely compelling relic of the country’s economic crisis.
Stay awesome,
Lia
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