TIME Best Inventions 2026: Leaft Foods’ Rubisco Protein, Beyond Ground Faba and Lavazza Tablì Lead the Food & Drink Picks

TIME has published its 2026 Best Inventions list, and the food and drink selections lean towards simpler formulations, new protein sources and packaging reduction rather than meat analogues. Leaft Foods’ Rubisco-based Blade drink, Beyond Meat’s Ground Faba and Lavazza’s Tablì coffee system all make the 300-entry list, while Milkadamia’s 2D-printed oat milk sheets are among the 100 special mentions.

The list, now in its 26th year, was drawn from nominations by TIME editors and correspondents and an online application process. Entries were judged on originality, efficacy, ambition and impact. Green Queen notes that this year’s list is lighter on alternative protein than previous editions.

Leaft Blade: Rubisco at commercial scale

New Zealand-based Leaft Foods extracts Rubisco, the most abundant protein on Earth, from alfalfa leaves. The protein is locked inside tough cell walls and accounts for about 3% of a leaf’s content, and TIME says it took Leaft years to build a process that supports harvesting at scale. The method depends on crop selection, harvest timing and careful material handling to keep the protein intact.

Blade, the company’s first consumer product, is a vegan, single-serve 100 ml pouch with 18 g of protein, iron, a complete amino acid profile and vitamins B2 and B12. TIME describes it as technically unflavoured, with a taste the company calls “green”. Green Queen reports that Leaft’s alfalfa protein isolate produces 97% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than whey, and that California açaí chain Palmetto Superfoods has used Blade as a smoothie base.

Green Queen adds that Rubisco is a complete protein with a PDCAAS score similar to beef, egg whites and dairy proteins. For ingredient buyers, the recognition puts leaf protein in front of a mainstream audience.

Beyond Ground Faba: a clean-label pivot

Beyond Meat’s Ground Faba, launched in 2025, contains four ingredients: water, faba bean protein, potato protein and psyllium husk. One serving provides 27 g of protein and 4 g of fibre. Beyond uses an extruder to extract plant nutrients and then heat and pressure to give them a texture comparable to animal protein, but the product is positioned as a ground protein in its own right rather than a beef copy.

“It’s a way of skipping that entire process of having an animal consolidate [nutrients],” CEO Ethan Brown told TIME. The product answers criticism of the long ingredient lists in Beyond’s core range and fits the ‘simple ingredients’ trend that Whole Foods Market named among its 2027 food trend predictions, according to Green Queen. Green Queen notes that Ground Faba is still sold only through Beyond’s own online store, which leaves open whether the award helps it into grocery.

Packaging: Lavazza Tablì and Milkadamia

Lavazza’s Tablì system replaces single-serve capsules with compressed pucks of ground, tamped coffee. TIME says the pucks arrive by the dozen in plant-based packaging between two sheets of thin plastic film rather than in individually wrapped pods, cost about $1 each and stay fresh for about 14 days after opening. The machine brews single, double and lungo shots in about 35 seconds. The design changes the coffee format itself instead of the brewer, removing the plastic and aluminium waste stream from each cup.

Among the special mentions, Milkadamia prints oat milk paste into shelf-stable sheets that consumers blend with water to make oat milk in about 60 seconds. Green Queen reports that the format cuts packaging waste by 94% and weight by 85%, with knock-on reductions in transport emissions.

What the picks signal

Read together, the food entries point to three themes for product developers: fewer ingredients with a clear nutrition story, protein from underused plant sources, and dehydrated or compressed formats that reduce packaging and shipping weight. Outside food, the list also includes AMSilk’s recombinant spider silk, produced by precision fermentation, a reminder that the same biomanufacturing toolkit is finding buyers in materials as well as ingredients.