Future Food Quick Bites: Chia Seed Milk, Healthy Ham & Vegan Calcium

Our weekly column rounds up the latest sustainable food innovation news. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers Benexia’s new chia seed milk, Violife’s campaign with Chrishell Stause, and Holy Carrot’s upcoming restaurant in London.

New products and launches

Chilean company Benexia has launched what it says is the first milk alternative made from whole chia seeds. Launched under its Seeds of Wellness brand, the Chia Milk is available at Costco and on Amazon in the US for $27.99 for a six-pack.

Speaking of the US, Kate Farms‘s Kids Nutrition shakes are making their national retail debut at Target. The pea-milk-based products come in chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla flavours, and contain 27 vitamins and minerals.

Alt-dairy giant Violife has launched a Creamy Confessions campaign to support the launch of its lentil-based Supreme Coffee Creamers, featuring celebrities like Chrishell Stause (Selling Sunset, The Traitors), Bozoma Saint John (The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills), Sasha Farber (Dancing with the Stars), and more.

The Plant Based Seafood Co. – known for its Mind Blown label – has launched two new brands. Hills Bay Classics focuses on crab cakes and a ‘seafood extender’, while Smash It is centred around health and GLP-1 support.

Speaking of marine products, New Zealand-based Nutrition from Water has released Marine Whey Golden 35, a clean-label algae protein designed for bakery and dairy applications.

Likewise, Los Angeles-based Vegan Minerals has introduced Calcea, a plant-based calcium ingredient sourced from red algae. Apart from the bioavailable calcium, it provides magnesium, over 70 essential trace minerals, and 16 amino acids, while offering superior absorption thanks to a natural honeycomb structure.

France’s HappyVore has released a vegan ham with a Nutri-Score A rating, and a score of 84 out of 100 on nutrition product scanning app Yuka. A Saveur de l’Année (Taste of the Year) 2025 recipient, it contains 20g of protein per 100g from peas and beans and is available at Carrefour.

In Germany, The Raging Pig Company is leaning into the smash burger trend with a new plant-based patty for restaurants. It’s made from peas and mushrooms and is available via select foodservice distributors.

In a bid to revitalise plant-based meat and seafood, Dutch family business Schouten Europe has rolled out Power Bites and Sea Bites as its latest product innovations.

Meanwhile, UK-based Better Nature has enhanced its tempeh recipe to boost the protein content from 19g to 22g per 100g serving, which is the same as three eggs, up to 400g of butter beans, or two-thirds of a chicken breast.

Chinese vegan protein brand Starfield is showcasing its diverse range of products, including the Poki Salad Bar, vegan bacon strips, and dairy-free cheese at the 2025 International Food & Drink Event (IFE) in London.

And London-based vegan restaurant Holy Carrot is bringing its Michelin Guide-approved vegetable-forward concept to the East End with a new location in Old Spitalfields Market, which is set to open by the end of the year.

Company and finance updates

Solar Foods, the Finnish company known for its gas-based Solein protein, has signed two MoUs with international customers to supply 6,000 tonnes of the ingredient per year. Additionally, it has announced a factory investment plan that could be Europe’s largest emission reduction project.

Finnish precision fermentation firm Onego Bio has completed the purchase of a 25.9-acre piece of land in Jefferson, Wisconsin for $777,000. Located at the Food and Beverage Innovation Campus, it will build a facility that will produce animal-free egg proteins equivalent to six million hens, and be operational in 2028.

Germany’s Formo, a fellow precision fermentation player working on dairy and egg proteins, has received a €1M ($1.1M) bioeconomy grant from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and partnered with Brain Biotech to advance strain development and bioprocess optimisation.

In Portugal, cultivated seafood maker Cell4Food has partnered with agrifood R&D specialist CoLab4Food to co-develop products and enhance their safety and nutritional values.

Meanwhile, Swedish cultivated meat startup Cellevate has appointed biopharma veteran Christel Fenge at CTO to turbo-charge its effort to commercialise its Cellevat3d nanofibre cell culture solutions.

Another cultivated meat company, Meatable, has hired two more meat industry veterans. Former Tyson Foods executive Maiko van der Meer has joined as the director of commerce, and Cargill and McCormick alum will join Eugene Leong as its Asia head in May.

AI protein discovery platform Shiru and plant biotech platform GreenLab have teamed up to commercialise novel food proteins for CPG applications using the latter’s corn expression system.

Policy developments

Peet’s Coffee has become the latest coffee chain to remove the surcharge on non-dairy milk, joining the likes of Starbucks, Dunkin’, Tim Hortons and others after campaigning from Sir Paul McCartney and charities like Peta.

Californian alternative protein pioneer Eat Just and its cultivated meat subsidiary, Good Meat, has agreed to pay $4.4M as part of its legal settlement with bioreactor supplier ABEC.

UK supermarket Morrisons has switched suppliers for its own-label coconut milk after a Peta Asia investigation exposed forced monkey labour in Thailand’s coconut industry. The product will now be sourced from Peta-verified Merit Food Products.

EIT Food and Mars Petcare have selected BioscienZ and Cremer Sustainable Nutrition as the winners of their Fiber Valorisation for Pet Food Challenge. They will now develop proof-of-concept studies to drive sustainable ingredient innovations, with the potential to develop long-term collaborations.

Check out last week’s Future Food Quick Bites.