On 18th, March 2025, Forward Fooding published its 2024 FoodTech 500 list, the 6th consecutive year Forward Fooding has published a FoodTech 500 list. Let's review the top ten companies on the list below and find out what type of business each is doing, and what technological innovations are worth focusing on.

1. Apeel Sciences

Apeel Sciences, an American food technology company based in California and founded in 2012. To conquer the global challenge of food waste due to spoilage, the company was established from the aim of developing safer, sustainable solutions help prolong the quality and shelf life of wholesome, fresh, whole produce so that consumers will be more likely to safely store and consume this produce.

2. ProducePay

ProducePay, an agricultural financial technology company founded in 2014, has its headquarters in Los Angeles. They aim to make the agricultural supply chain more efficient and lower market risk through the provision of services such as financing, market matching and data analytics to growers, wholesalers and retailers.

3. Nature's Fynd

Nature's Fynd (USA) is a food technology company located in Chicago, USA, founded in 2012. It is a naturally occurring microorganisms of Fusarium strain flavolapis found in Yellowstone National Park, a genus of fungi that the company used to produce a range of food products. Fy is a full vegan protein that contains all 20 amino acids, according to its website.

4. Plantible

Plantible is a food tech company from California, USA founded in 2018. Rubi Protein, the duckweed extract product of the company has numerous benefits. Boasting 85% protein, it not only provides all nine essential amino acids but you can also find a wealth of vitamins (think vitamin B12), along with minerals. Rubi Protein scored a perfect 1.0 on its Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAAS), an important measure of protein quality, and is abundant, scalable and low-cost to produce.

5. Heura Foods

Founded in 2017, Heura Foods is a Barcelona, Spain-based food technology company. The jewel in the crown of the company is their Heura, a meat substitute that consists of 100% legumes, made by extracting proteins from soybeans and peas, making protein concentrates, mixing them with filtered water and working them into a dough that is then moulded by changing pressure and temperature.

6. Terviva

Terviva is an innovative food and agriculture company founded in 2010. The company collaborates with farmers to cultivate Pongamia. Pongamia is one very climate-resilient tree that generates huge amounts of protein- and oil-rich seeds. It has a lot of ecological benefits — each acre of pongamia orchard absorbs an average of 5 tonnes of carbon per year, and improves soil health and water quality.

7. Starfield

Starfield, a plant-based health food firm with its R&D capability and self-built production base, was founded in 2019 and is a Chinese food technology firm. At present, Starfield has 40 patented technologies, of which 80% are plant-based food patents and 20% are equipment patents, and has more than 300 kinds of finished plant protein food application solutions.

8. Winnow

Winnow is a London-based technology company focused on cutting food waste in commercial kitchens. The company has pioneered AI powered solutions that enable the catering industry to cut food waste, maximize operational efficiency and ultimately profit. In 2017, the company was successfully registered as a B Corp (i.e. B Corp certified as co-beneficial enterprise).

9. CropX

CropX, an agri-tech company, was established in 2015. CropX is digitizing farms for precision agriculture, with solutions from simple to install sensors (soil monitoring, rainfall measurement, meteorological data collection, evapotranspiration calculation, remote monitoring, etc.), through a farm management software (FMS), and dealer and agribusiness management tools built for scale to easily run farm operations.

10. UPSIDE Foods

UPSIDE Foods is a food technology company founded in 2015 that specializes in producing cell-cultured meats, based in Berkeley, California, and is one of only two companies in the United States to be approved to sell cultured meat products. UPSIDE Foods launched the world's first cell-cultured beef meatballs back in 2016; in 2017, it became successful in producing the world's first cell-cultured chickens and ducks.