Every week, Maddyness brings you financial and investing highlights from the startup scene. Here's a selection of this weeks investments.

It's no wonder that all the flavours come from the natural world. With vegans, plant lovers and sustainable food seekers, the food industry has experienced a turn. Startups and tech help towards reaching new levels of demand. Maddyness has selected some of the coolest foodtech startups redefining how we think about and consume food.

2019’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show might have had some impressively manicured moss courtesy of Ishihara’s Green Switch garden and the meadow-like wilderness of Kate Middleton’s Back to Nature garden, but it was Tom Dixon’s Research Studio collaboration with Ikea that caught our eye. This Sci-Fi-like garden helped bring the future farm into the foreground, demonstrating the benefits of hydroponics and giving both food producers and enterprising at-home gardeners something to think about.

As new tech attempts to solve every issue in our modern world, the problems that periods bring to the lives of women are no exception. There has been an influx of menstruation technology over the last few years including electronic devices that can stop period pains to period underwear. Here are some of the latest.

Humans first landed on the moon in 1969. Apollo 11's spaceflight was televised for audiences across the globe who saw Neil Armstrong become the first person to step foot on the moon. Now 50 years later, space is becoming an accessible arena for startup companies on earth, outside of NASA and a new race has begun.

If we compare today's food habits to those of a decade ago, we see a seismic shift in behaviour. In the U.K. traditional three-course meals are a rarity with new eating habits being adopting all the time. Health, technology and work are factors that are influencing these changes. But what will end up on our plates in 2020, and how are startups anticipating this?

The recurring themes of happiness and wellbeing in the workplace seem to be compulsory in today’s world. We are expected to be happy at work, just like at home. These concerns are embodied by the emergence of a new job to monitor this, whose title “Chief Happiness Officer” has already proven controversial. However, does this new role really contribute to an increase in productivity or is it rather a way to pick up the slack of poor managers? Sylvain Tillon, co-founder of Tilkee, discusses the question.