Quote:Soylens Fuscus, Ltd.Location:  No dedicated colonies, but offices in most colony cylinders, and plants in most of those.Products:  Well, it's edible, but would you really trust it?  You know where it's been.Founded:  2024Likes:  Low-income spacenoids (primary customers), starship manufacturers (SF reprocessing units are installed on lots of ships by default), collectivist regimes (Feeding The People in space)Ambivalent Towards:  Ideology, except when it interferes with business.Dislikes:  All other food production companies (the competition is violent), environmental/organic ideological groups, SynthPaste (their most direct competitor)Liked By:  ...anybody?  Anybody?Disliked By:  Just about everybody.  They're a necessity, not a desired product.Likelihood of Screwing Over Shadowrunners:  Yes.
The waste has to go somewhere.  This is a universal truth.  On land, it can be piped away, but in space?  There's not much of anywhere to send it.
Soylens Fuscus started as an Earth sanitation company (under a different name), specializing in reprocessing human waste into clean water and fertilizers.  The corporate sovereignty acts of the 2060s led to the founding of hundreds of new settlements across the globe, and the company that would become Soylens Fuscus took the opportunity to expand its customer base.  Over the next few decades, they entered into a series of quiet partnerships with various megacorps, expanding across the European continent, and into the Americas.
With the start of the Universal Century, the corporation that would become Soylens Fuscus saw the future... and the future was colonial monopoly.  As their partners founded colonies, they naturally followed, only to leverage that experience to land even more contracts with even more colonies.  By 2120, the proto-SF had secured exclusive contracts with 34% of all colonies founded at the time.
It was in 2126 when the company's science division made a breakthrough.  They had invented a process that could take human waste, both liquid and solid, and reprocess it directly into edible solids and drinkable liquids.  The company changed its name to Soylens Fuscus in 2127, began setting up waste conversion plants on a number of colonies, and started to aggressively market its reprocessed foods.
Results were mixed.  Even at the low prices SF charged, few people wanted to eat their reprocessed meals.  Market research indicated that those who did purchase SF Helpers (tm) were the poorest of the poor- people who had no other way to support themselves.  Instead of abandoning the concept of reprocessed foods, the SF executives set their science division a new task- develop a line of SF converters suitable for installation on mass-produced spaceships.  In the meantime, SF Helpers (tm) were taken off the market, and retooled into the F-Series of emergency rations.
This approach proved rather more successful.  Most major shipwrights signed contracts with SF, integrating their patented AntiStarve emergency ration generators into ships of all sizes from 2129 on.  The colonial poor also proved more willing to purchase emergency rations than reprocessed food... despite there being no real difference between the two.
The rise of CCA in the 2130s sent Soylens Fuscus into a slump.  Asteroid miners, one of SF's captive customer bases, were thrilled to have fresh... well, fresher... food available to them for reasonable prices.  Once they were given the option, SF sales to the asteroid miner population decreased by 95%.  Naturally, the SF leadership wasn't about to take this laying down.  Instead of improving their product, or reducing the price still further, Soylens Fuscus engaged in a war by proxy, sending bands of mercenaries to disrupt several key CCA farming and distribution centers over the next few years.  It wasn't enough to shut them down, but between the repair costs, lost product, and a few lots of tainted product, SF was able to recapture a good chunk of the asteroid miner market from CCA.
Since that time, SF and CCA have been at each other's throats, competing for every market and every contract.  It's not a particularly secret war- just about every spacenoid out there knows not to eat CCA food near the local SF plant, and vice versa.  They just don't know the full extent of the war.  By the late 0030s, CCA had discovered (by capturing and interrogating an SF merc) who was behind the attacks on their property; for the next forty years, the two companies would engage in a bloody war to the knife- a shadow war only ended by the Principality of Zeon in 0079.

Quote:Demeter AgriculturalLocation:  Several colony cylinders.  One in Side 1, the others in the business Sides.Products:  Wheat, rye, corn, free-range chicken/beef/pork, some fruits and veggies.Founded:  2107Likes:  Space colonization (customers), Eurocorp (one of their bigger customers), the Federation government (the higher-ups in their capital like fresh food)Ambivalent Towards:  Earth ('nuff said), Space Independence (they like the idea of cutting Earth out of the market, but combat?  Nope.), Daikoku (different markets, some collaborative efforts (and a lot of top restaurants contracting both)Dislikes:  SynthPaste, Soylens Fuscus, FungiMonkey, CCA (competition), some of the private colonies (for being self-sufficient), OmniConsumer Products (Demeter lost BILLIONS when OCP bought out New Detroit for themselves), UAC Jupiter (it's a long and expensive story)Liked By:  Culturally European spacenoids (who can afford fresh food), Kubota-Deere (good customer), Degwin Zabi (the same way a shark likes swimmers- if Zeon wins, DA is up for 'nationalization', read: forced purchase by the Zabi Group)Disliked By:  The competition (see 'Dislikes'), UAC Jupiter (the feud is quite mutual)Likelihood of Screwing Over Shadowrunners:  Low, unless it'd hurt one of their lower-cost rivals... assuming it's a corporate contract.  If it's an individual exec hiring you, all bets are off.
History:  DA is, in many ways, a mirror of the Daikoku Group.  Both were founded early in the UC as joint ventures, both provide quality foodstuffs to their respective cultures, and both are tightly in bed with their local manufacturing 'corps.  The differences start with how they were founded.  Daikoku is a creature of the business interests of Japan- it was founded by the 'corps, as a means to an end.  Demeter, on the other hand, was a joint project of the European agricultural industry, created to go where the markets were- to space.
Where Daikoku had an easy time getting into space, having the resources of its parent keiretsu to draw upon, Demeter ran into a host of issues.  Without industrial sponsors, getting into space was far more expensive; the first Demeter farm cylinder, its base started in 2108, ended up floating, inert, for fourteen months due to lack of funds.  Construction resumed in 2110, after the original Demeter founders struck a deal with an American consortium; in return for a 50% share of the company, the American agricorps would provide funding sufficient to finish the cylinder.
Until Persephone Colony opened its doors in UC 0016, most of Side 1's population had been supported by Earth-based agriculture.  Its presence was mutually beneficial; the local spacenoids got fresher food for a lower cost, and Demeter got all the business it could handle.  It was a net win for the company- sure, 73% of their business came from Demeter investors back on Earth, but cutting the costly orbital lifting and transport out of the equation let the company cut prices and still make quite a bit more profit.
Where Persephone was a marginal success, Isis and Gefjun, located on more distant Sides, proved sizably more lucrative.  Their sheer distance from Earth made them captive markets, without competition... until the advent of Soylens Fuscus, CCI, and the later SynthPaste.  Profits dropped at that point- not from profitable to not profitable, but from massively profitable to acceptably profitable.  Demeter's response was to steal a line from CCI, and turn an asteroid into a farming base.  Appropriately enough, they secured the rights to Ceres.
Negotiations with UAC Jupiter... went poorly, to the tune of billions in cargo (and a small flotilla of megafreighters) lost; neither 'corp will admit to what happen, even to this day, but they went from cordial potential partners to sworn enemies.  Discussion with Poseidon Helium went significantly more smoothly, and DA secured another steady stream of income.