'Cause This Is Thriller – Engineered Meat, US Inflation & The Slow Unravelling of EU Regulation #214

Plus hantavirus, Singapore's FDI Flow, and how modern footwear is killing our joint and back

May 10, 2026

Between hantavirus headlines and everything else this week, we considered just sending you a blank email with “go touch grass, stay healthy” as the subject line.

But the world goes on, and there are important signals this week:

In one week, engineered/lab-grown meat made so much noise:
- On May 5th, Californian startup Biosphere received a $9 million grant from the US Army to build portable bioreactors producing gas-fermented proteins for “remote and logistically constrained environments”.
- One day before, May 4th, the US Army is calling on companies and researchers to develop alternative proteins for Meals Ready-to-Eat (MREs), covering precision fermentation and novel biomanufacturing methods. From 2027, vegan options will replace the current vegetarian dishes. For context, the US military issues over 37 million MREs every year, and they are one of the world’s largest food procurement operations.
- Across the Atlantic, on May 7th, UK startup Meatly raised $14 million to build Europe’s largest cultivated meat facility in London, with pet food launches planned for 2027.
- Meanwhile, Amsterdam became the world’s first capital city to ban advertisements for meat and fossil fuels in public spaces, effective May 1.
Now, hear me out. I’m a vegetarian, so perhaps I should be very happy about this. But I can’t help thinking: why specifically lab-grown meat? What about tofu or tempeh, which have been around for thousands of years?
Anyhow, it seems like the second spring for lab-grown protein is here, after a very tough 2024-2025 period. This time, the push is definitely coming from institutions, not just startups in previous waves. If we dig deeper, on February 14th 2021, Bill Gates did an interview with MIT Technology Review and declared, “Rich nations should shift entirely to synthetic beef”. Things seem to be falling into pieces indeed.
Some will win, some will lose. US inflation hit 3.3% in March 2026, up from 2.4% in January and the highest reading since May 2024. Energy prices rose 12.5% year-on-year, with gasoline up 18.9% and fuel oil up 44.2% as a direct or indirect result of Hozmuz. The IMF now doesn’t expect inflation back at the Fed’s 2% target until 2027 at the earliest.
This affects the manufacturing sector massively; the ISM Prices index surged to 84.6 in April, its highest since April 2022 (Covid time with supply chain disruption). For context: an ISM Prices Index reading above 50 means prices are rising, 84.6 indicates a broad, sharp increase in input costs across manufacturers. Manufacturing is still expanding (PMI at 52.7 for the fourth straight month), but it’s expanding on rising input costs and lengthening lead times, the combination that compresses margins fastest.
Among all manufacturing sectors, chemical and petrochemical producers are taking the brunt, with crude- and polyethylene-linked product lines already running through multiple price spikes. We wrote an in-depth analysis here for those who are watching how this will unfold for the manufacturing sector in the US in the upcoming months.
Speaking of where money is flowing, Singapore pulled in $197 billion in FDI in 2025, up 8.4% year-on-year. The US, Netherlands, Ireland, Mainland China, and the UK accounted for 46.8% of total inflows. Finance and insurance alone received 63.9%. For context, in comparison: Indonesia got $53 billion, Vietnam $38 billion, and Malaysia/Thailand combined for around $21 billion. Singapore continues to punch absurdly above its weight as a capital magnet in ASEAN. As for manufacturing sector, Singapore remains the “leader” in high-end industrial value (Precision Engineering, Pharma, Chips etc.), though in sheer physical volume and total manufacturing output, Indonesia (Resource Processing, EVs, Food etc.) and Vietnam (Smartphones, Textiles, Electronics etc.) have overtaken Singapore. If you’re in this space, dive into our Guide “Sourcing in China & Vietnam 2026” which gives context around China-ASEAN’s industrial ecosystem.
Back to Europe, on May 5th, the EU confirmed this week that the EUDR will be enforceable from December 30, 2026, with no further delays. Implementation for most micro and small operators begins June 30, 2027. This follows two rounds of delays since the regulation was first set to take effect at the end of 2024.
The timing is interesting. Just a week earlier, 32 US Congress members wrote to Commission President von der Leyen, urging her to “hold the line and implement the EUDR as currently written.” Their letter directly called out the Trump administration’s efforts to weaken the regulation, noting that the USDA has been lobbying European capitals to introduce a “no risk” classification for certain countries, including the US. The Congressional representatives argued that the Trump administration, having repealed domestic forest protections, “cannot be seen as a credible negotiator on the EUDR.”
UN data shows the US is responsible for 120,000 hectares of forest loss annually over the last decade. Globally, over 10 million hectares are deforested each year, accounting for up to 21% of greenhouse gas emissions.
But that’s fine, because according to Bill Gates again, planting trees for climate change mitigation is“complete nonsense”, and he asked, “Are we science people or are we the idiots?” To which I’d answer: planting trees is for idiots because it doesn’t make any money. For others, I guess they do engineered meat.
Still on regulation, a broad coalition of food, beverage, and packaging companies, including Coca-Cola, Heineken, Carlsberg, Ball Corporation, and Ardagh Group, has written to EU leaders asking for parts of the PPWR to be delayed.
The regulation is due to apply from August 12, 2026. The signatories say they support the objectives but warn that key provisions remain unclear, less than four months before implementation, and that divergent national interpretations could fragment the Single Market.
Zero Waste Europe has pushed back strongly, arguing that the PPWR went through a full co-decision process and should now move to implementation as planned.
The deregulation push in the EU has gained momentum since the end of 2025. REACH revision was dropped. PPWR is being challenged. EUDR has already been delayed twice. The pattern is quite clear: regulation in the EU gets announced with ambition and runs headlines, then meets downsizing. We’ll keep tracking what actually sticks.

Enjoy your weekend. Stay sharp, and keep building.

Anh

On behalf of the Tocco team

Who Made Our Curated Materials Lists This Week?

The materials landscape is getting noisier. More suppliers, more claims, more labels that don’t always hold up under scrutiny. Finding the right partner in any of these spaces takes time that most teams don’t have.

That is why our team has been building curated supplier maps across the material categories where we see the most activity and the most confusion. Each one is handpicked, validated, and updated weekly as new information comes in.

Currently live on MatterDrop: PHA (top 20) , Low-VOC Coatings and Paints (top 30), Seaweed-Based Materials (top 27), Bio-based Adhesives (top 15), Leather Alternatives (top 35), Cellulose Foams and Moulded Pulp (top 26), Bio-based Pigments and Natural Dyes (top 15), and Mycelium-Based Materials (top 29). Twenty more categories are coming next week.

If you’re sourcing in any of these spaces, take a look. If you produce and supply - and think you should be nominated in these lists or other ones, submit your information, and our team will validate if relevant within 24 hours.

Check All Themes Here

Conversation with John Gibson, Biomechanics Designer on Footwear & Joint Pain

This week on Long Game: Leon, Tocco CEO, sat down with John Gibson, a movement scientist, computational designer, and footwear researcher who builds what the industry hasn’t thought to make yet.

The conversation goes places you wouldn’t expect from a footwear episode:

why the modern shoe industry work like processed food for our musculoskeletal system?
why standard consumers shouldn’t be wearing the same ultra-performance gear as elite marathon runners?
and why the future points toward hyper-personalised, 3D-printed shoes created from a phone scan?
they also get into biomimicry, biodegradable PHA-based knitted materials, zero-waste production, and the unglamorous reality of being a young entrepreneur pushing through constant cycles of failure?

Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

The Industrialist Review

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