The path to innovation success in food tech isn’t linear

Perhaps it’s because I’m in the food and agriculture innovation space and work with great people every day, but it seems like this is one of the most creative and exciting times to bring more sustainable food options to consumers around the world.

If you look around, there are some amazing farmers, growers, university teams, startups, global corporations, and government organizations making significant contributions to how we will grow our food for decades to come. What’s even more exciting is these groups are working together to solve problems, break through barriers, and move forward with more sustainable ways to grow food.

Nearly everyone I meet in the industry knows that food isn’t just another industry sector to work in – it’s the most important sector there is! Everyone in the food industry deserves our thanks.  

The purpose of this article – despite all of my personal excitement about the innovation in food and agriculture – is to call out the fact that success in food technology is not going to be linear. Despite all of our best efforts, collaborations, funding and passion, we are going to have failures. There are going to be companies where we place our hard-earned money and our hopes who absolutely will fail. I don’t think there is one sector in 100 years when everything has gone 100% to plan.

At Big Idea Ventures, we have made more than 120 investments in food companies across more than 30 countries around the world. We decided to nearly double the length of time we work with our portfolio companies, sleeves rolled up, incredibly active. That time and effort has meant our failure rate is much lower than others in the industry, but we have still had companies who have closed their doors. We have also had companies experiencing near meteoric growth… in the same sectors.

‘In the same sectors’ is the most important point here. A company, no matter how big, can fail. When that happens, it’s not an indication that the whole sector is flawed. The food technology sector has amazing companies, some significant in size, and there is always the potential for them to fail.  

There are many reasons for failure – many are internal, structural, company specific. Some of the failures occur because what we are trying to do is hard!

When I look across the companies that I’ve spent time with that are no longer in business, it’s usually clear the underlying reasons why these ceased to exist. Often the reasons can be traced back to internal reasons – fund-raising which takes longer than expected because of expectations of readily available capital, founders and teams in conflict, founders mentally burnt out, and more. Hand on heart, none of them in my memory closed because the food sector they were pursuing was not valid. Yet when some companies in the future inevitably fail, we will also inevitably have naysayers proclaiming the sector is dead.

So, what happens then? Those investors that do not have deep knowledge in these sectors – who followed the initial excitement and made less insightful investments in
‘me too’ companies – will join the chorus of negativity, claiming their investments were not at fault but an indicator of market weakness (plant-based foods anyone?).

There are many reasons for failure – many are internal, structural, company specific. Some of the failures occur because what we are trying to do is hard!

One next big uphill battle in protein is scaling production in these new technologies – it’s guaranteed there will be casualties along the way as we take time and resources to solve challenges.

As I meet and invest in more and more people who are working on these challenges, I am excited about what lies ahead. From breeding or engineering for higher protein yields and enhanced functionality, to advancements in fat innovation, strain engineering, and optimizing bioreactors, the solutions are plentiful, and people are hard at work.

The next phase of investment is necessary to support the category for scale. Many investors may not have the long-term vision and understanding of how innovative technologies will impact the industry in the future. If you are looking to invest in a category that is enormous and going through tremendous changes, be careful who you bet on.

Governments are seeing they and their countries have new opportunities to be world leaders in food sectors being changed and moved forward by innovation. That innovation is coming from multiple sources – the forward-thinkers who have been in the sectors for decades, the farmers and growers, and universities, startups, corporations.

Coming back to the inevitable failures, what can we do about it? We can back the right people, we can work together, we can consolidate, making sure we don’t lose the progress we’ve made in those companies that fail. We can see individual company failures for what they are and not extrapolate a specific event to be a global indicator of failure.

We need honesty and transparency about why these failures occurred. We should do our best not to politicize every positive and negative event. We’re seeing more legislation that discriminates against food innovation, with bans, defamatory labeling, limitations on research, and a dissonance between the federal/state/country level. Even cultivated meat has been dragged into the culture wars, and it is essential we are transparent and address misinformation.

The leadership roles and market shares across the food and agricultural sectors are not locked in; they are always up for grabs when the incumbents sit too long on their laurels, believing nothing will ever change.

And we, at Big Idea Ventures, have made it our mission to support the world’s best entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers throughout that journey.

Andrew D. Ive is the Founder/Managing General Partner, at Big Idea Ventures. He is an advisory board member for Tufts Nutrition Council, is a Friedman School Entrepreneurship advisor, Harvard Business School graduate, Procter & Gamble brand management trained, and has spent a number of years as an entrepreneur growing companies. This article is republished from the Q2 2024 edition of Protein Production Technology International, the industry's leading resource for alternative proteins. To subscribe to all future editions, please click here