Planted

Planted is the European whole-cut plant-meat scale-up that has actually crossed from novelty into retail distribution, and it did it with the technology the category needs — texture, not just flavor. Its biostructuring fermentation process, layered on top of extrusion, produced a "first of its kind" fermented steak that launched in 2024 and now sits on shelves at Coop in Switzerland, REWE in Germany and, critically, a major Tesco listing across the UK, alongside an established foodservice presence. That retail footprint is the moat plant-meat startups have mostly failed to build: the category's boom-bust cycle punished ground-format me-too products, but a convincing whole cut with a clean-ish label and a claimed 97% CO2e reduction is a different pitch to grocers wrestling with sustainability targets. The spin-out from ETH Zurich gives it real process IP — a fermented steak grown in a bioreactor for 30-40 hours is genuinely hard to copy — and the roughly CHF 115M ($131M) raised from L Catterton and Tengelmann Ventures capitalized both the whole-cut R&D and a new southern-Germany production facility the company bills as Europe's most modern plant-based plant. In a subsector where most peers are retreating, Planted holds the combination of differentiated product, multi-country retail placement and manufacturing scale that a consolidating market rewards.