> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://entrepreneurplus.co.uk/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # UK Food Technology in 2026: Who's Actually Making Money - URL: https://entrepreneurplus.co.uk/uk-food-technology-in-2026-whos-actually-making-money/ - Published: 2026-08-20T12:00:13.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-20T12:00:13.000Z - Description: UK food technology has raised £918 million, but the money is concentrated. We examine which companies have real commercial traction and which are still betting on ambitious food science. - Author: Sharoni Banerjee - Tags: Sector Spotlights --- If we ask most people what excites them about UK food technology right now, they will likely point to the same handful of images: fungi grown into the shape of a steak, dairy proteins built inside a fermentation tank, an app that rescues a box of unsold vegetables before it reaches landfill. Every one of these ideas has a founder, a funding round, and a press release behind it. What is harder to find is an answer to a duller, more useful question, which of these businesses are actually selling anything yet, and which are still running on investor patience and the promise of lab-grown meat headlines still to come. --- ## The UK Foodtech Boom Has a Commerciality Problem We went looking for that answer using fresh data from Beauhurst, which tracks equity funding across the UK's food technology companies, and what we found was not a broadly distributed sector so much as a very narrow funnel. UK food technology companies have raised £918 million in total equity to date, and more than a third of that, £321 million, belongs to one company. **Gousto**, the meal-kit business, is the only firm in the entire sector with more than 1,000 employees and established status. Add **Rekki**, the restaurant-supplier software platform, and **OLIO,** the food waste management app that lets people give away surplus food locally, and the top five companies, which also include **Uncommon** and **NOTPLA**, account for 54% of everything the sector has ever raised. London alone is home to 26 of the sector's top 50 companies, which tells its own quieter story about where UK innovation clusters. --- ## Gousto Is the Outlier That concentration tells its own story too. **Rekki** and **OLIO** have both raised tens of millions of pounds, £52.3 million and £46.4 million respectively, and both have real, verifiable commercial traction. **Rekki** works with restaurant suppliers up and down the country, coordinating orders that used to happen over the phone. **OLIO** has built a genuine consumer habit around food waste reduction, turning a box of unwanted vegetables into something a neighbour will collect within the hour. But neither has reached **Gousto's** scale, years after their founding rounds, and both remain classified as venture or growth stage rather than established. We think that gap is worth sitting with. It suggests that even the strongest performers outside food technology's one outlier are still mid-journey, not proof of concept. --- ## Alternative Protein Is Still Waiting for the Shelf Move away from meal kits and food waste management, into the alternative protein corner of UK food technology, and the gap between funding and commercial reality widens further. **Better Dairy** has raised just over $24 million since 2020, according to Dealroom, across an £80,000 pre-seed round, a £1.6 million seed round, a $22 million Series A, and a £122,000 UK Research and Innovation grant, all to grow dairy proteins through precision fermentation using genetically modified yeast in place of a cow. It has no product on the market. It is still in early discussions with infant formula brands, and is targeting US regulatory approval as early as next year. **Adamo Foods**, meanwhile, has raised £2.95 million in tracked equity funding according to Beauhurst, alongside earlier pre-seed and seed rounds reported at up to £3.5 million combined in trade press, to turn fungal mycelium into a whole-cut steak alternative, a genuinely hard problem given that whole cuts make up most of the conventional meat market but are almost entirely absent from plant-based shelves. As of its last confirmed funding announcement, Adamo was still preparing for its first product launch, with no confirmed retail date since. --- ## Promising Isn't the Same as Commercially Proven Both companies were named in this year's Startups 100 index, published in January, alongside dozens of other early-stage businesses the judges consider the most promising in the country. That recognition matters, and we do not think it is undeserved. But it sits at an odd angle to the Beauhurst numbers, which show a sector where investment fell to its lowest level since 2018 last year, even as the number of active companies kept climbing. Being named promising and being commercially proven are not the same claim, and UK food technology coverage does not always draw that line as clearly as it should. Neither **Better Dairy** nor **Adamo Foods** is doing anything close to lab-grown meat in the strict sense. That term belongs to cultivated meat platforms growing animal cells directly, a different and even more capital-intensive corner of the sector occupied by firms like Uncommon, but both companies sit inside the same broader bet as the alternative protein industry at large: heavily funded, scientifically ambitious, and still pre-revenue. That is not a criticism in itself. Precision fermentation and alternative protein science are genuinely hard, and the UK's regulatory pipeline, overseen by the Food Standards Agency, has historically moved slowly on novel foods and synthetic meat products, though reforms in 2025 have started to clear some of that backlog. But it does mean the synthetic meat headlines and the commercial reality of most UK alternative protein businesses are, right now, two different stories. --- ## Funding Is Falling While the Sector Gets More Selective So what do we take from putting these five companies side by side? We noticed that UK food technology does not really have a scaling problem in the way funding rounds suggest. It has a translation problem. **Gousto** proves the model can work at scale. **Rekki** and **OLIO** prove there is real, growing demand for tools that solve unglamorous, specific problems, including food waste management done well. But the sector's loudest, most fundable ideas, the ones built on precision fermentation and fungal biomass, are also its slowest to reach a shelf. New company formation backs this up too. The number of food technology businesses founded each year has fallen from a peak of 18 in 2018 to just five in 2025, even as the total number of active companies has grown, which suggests investors are backing fewer, more advanced bets rather than a widening pipeline of newcomers. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/05/a4/05a4a052-18ab-4836-8924-ec8b322c371c/content/images/2026/08/food-waste-management.png.png) Food technology fermentation facility ## The Real Question: Who Gets Funded Next? We do not think that is a verdict on whether **Better Dairy** or **Adamo Foods** will succeed. Both are still early, and this sector has always rewarded patient capital more than most, but it does raise a genuine question worth sitting with for anyone watching UK food technology in 2026\. As funding tightens and formations slow, will investors keep backing ambitious science with long timelines, or will the money follow **Gousto, Rekki and OLIO** toward businesses that already know how to sell something. We are watching to see which way that swings, and what it will mean for the founders caught in between. Also read: [*UK Quantum Computing: Where the £2 Billion Pledge Actually Lands*](https://entrepreneurplus.co.uk/uk-quantum-computing-where-the-2-billion-pledge-actually-lands/) --- **Sources:* Beauhurst, Top Foodtech Companies in the UK (April 2026); Dealroom, Better Dairy company profile; Companies House (Better Dairy Ltd, 12393734; Adamo Foods Ltd, 13490269); Startups.co.uk, Startups 100 2026 (January 2026); The Grocer, Vegconomist, Food Manufacture, Silicon Canals (Adamo Foods trade press funding coverage, 2023–2024).*