This Week in Food Tech: Upside Foods wastes no time in launching its own chicken.

Image Credits: Bar Crane sponsored foods/processed foods chicken feed

If you’re adventurous with your food or just want to keep up with the fast-moving food tech industry, here are this week’s stories and some of the top news we missed.

Upside Foods steps up to the plate

In what could be the first sale of farmed meat in the United States, Upside Foods said today it will unveil its full-textured product at chef Dominic Crane’s restaurant Bar Crane in San Francisco. This comes a week after it received approval to sell Cell’s chicken products in the US.

Topped chicken is fried in tempura batter, drizzled with a fiery chili aioli and garnished with edible flowers and greens. By the way, this is the first time that Bar Crane has put meat on the menu since it was removed in 2018, according to the company. The chicken he produces will be added to the restaurant’s side dishes in a series of monthly deliveries starting later this year.

As seen in TechCrunch

Blue Seafood was able to market $17.5 million worth of fish products.

Paul reported a new €16 million ($17.5 million) series funding round for Blue Seafood. The German company is creating processed fish products and unveiled its first products last August, which include fish sticks and fish balls.

Joyful Ventures Raises $23M Investment in Sustainable Protein Startups Focused Startups

Thriving startups in the alternative protein sector now have a new place to jump. Venture capital firm Joyful Ventures has announced its new fund. Joyful was co-founded by Jennifer Stojkovic, Milo Runkle and Blaine Vess. The company has made two investments from the fund, including New School Meals and Orbillion Bio.

Omelet is introduced from the beef technology approach to the production of meat growth media

Omet, a meat startup based out of Los Angeles, believes it has broken the rules of how to reduce the traditionally high cost of producing meat by using humanized regeneration factors extracted from cow plasma to create growth media.

Betterbrand’s new dough boosted the company’s value to more than $170 million.

BetterBrand, the food technology company known for creating “The Better Bagel,” has closed on $6 million in Series A capital at a preliminary valuation of $170 million. Betterbrand’s proprietary “grain-changing” technology combines non-GMO and clean label ingredients to create a line of better-for-you baked goods.

Make way for a new vegan protein on the menu

Natasha writes about the Finnish startup Solar Foods alternative protein Soline, which has been incorporated into custom (vegan) chocolate gelato at a restaurant in Singapore. She says not your average score.

Now is the time to make the meat

In April, we produced a critique focused on whether additional capacity for precision fermentation, which is what is needed to drive the industry forward and bring down costs, to produce meat produced using bioreactors.

For those in the more biomanufacturing facilities camp, Liberty Labs is contributing to that. This week, the company will be fully operational at its first facility in Indiana, which will have the capacity to produce up to 600,000 liters of bio-based proteins.

impossible v. Motif, take 20

In a previous roundup, I described the year-long lawsuit between Impossible Foods and Motif Foodworks, which Motif Impossible alleged had used false identities to obtain information about Motif products from private investigators.

Finally, the court decided that this impossible strategy does not violate any law, according to the story.

While that’s a sign of the impossible, the new thing is a sign for Motif: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board has agreed to review Impossible’s intellectual property for using heme to create plant-based meat substitutes. More here.

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If you have a juicy tip or lead on happenings in the venture and food tech world, you can reach Christine Hall at chall.techcrunch@gmail.com or Signal at 832-862-1051. Anonymous questions are respected.