Future Food
42 episodes - English - Latest episode: 6 months ago - ★★★★★ - 21 ratingsWhat will you be eating in 2050? How will it get to your table? How we grow, purchase, and eat our food is changing. New technologies and food products are playing a key role in shaping that change. In this podcast, we speak to the people driving that future, from entrepreneurs and venture capital investors, to farmers and food businesses. Welcome to Future Food!
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Episodes
Investing in agrifoodtech since 2017: Astanor's Eric Archambeau reflects
November 09, 2023 14:37 - 23 minutes - 22.2 MBFrom the heady days of the dot com boom -- and subsequent bust -- Eric Archambeau cofounded Astanor Ventures with George Coelho in 2017 as an impact venture capital fund for food and agriculture. "We founded it with a vision that the agrifood market was going to go through a deep disruption that was needed to move from a system that was delivering cheap calories, to a system that would be able to deliver affordable nutrients," Archambeau tells AgFunderNews on a new episode of the Future Foo...
From What’s Your Problem?: The Quest for the Perfect Avocado
May 26, 2022 13:34 - 25 minutes - 23 MBIn this preview, Jacob talks with Katherine Sizov, founder of Strella Biotechnology. Her problem: Tons of food is wasted before it ever gets to the consumer. Katherine started working on this problem in 2018, when she was a junior in college. Her idea: imitate the natural world and build a device that detects when fruit is ripening. It worked. Now some of the biggest apple and pear packers in America use her device. You can hear more from What’s Your Problem? at https://podcasts.pushkin.fm/w...
Soylent's CEO on shift towards middle America and the future of plant-based
October 22, 2021 09:00 - 35 minutes - 32.6 MBA somewhat controversial category, during my hot or not rounds on this podcast, most guests have responded negatively to the concept of replacing meals with a drink - and perhaps Soylent took this on board as in more recent years it's started calling itself a nutrition company with a small but growing number of product lines not just focused on meal replacement but all made from plants. Demir has been the CEO for nearly two years now and it's been a bit of a turnaround story as the company ...
How 'cool' fertilizers can sequester carbon and more, with Amy Yoder
October 15, 2021 15:34 - 30 minutes - 27.7 MBAmy Yoder is CEO of Anuvia Plant Nutrients, a company that's converting waste to help crops uptake fertilizers more efficiently, and even help them to sequester carbon in the soil. She is a trailblazer being one of the best-funded women in agtech on record, raising $103 million in Series D earlier this year. For those of you who aren't knowledgeable about the fertilizer industry, Amy gives a great description. Enjoy this episode with a powerhouse of agtech, Amy Yoder.
Diving deep with Sandhya Sriram on the future of cell-cultured seafood
June 25, 2021 15:05 - 40 minutes - 36.7 MBSince Sriram co-founded Shiok Meats three years ago, the startup has gone from strength to strength. According to AgFunder's most recent ASEAN Agrifoodtech Investment Report, it was Southeast Asia’s highest-funded startup in the ‘Innovative Food’ category in 2019. It raised $4.6 million for its April 2019 seed round, which saw Y Combinator make its first-ever investment in a ‘clean meat’ company. Last year, Shiok Meats netted $3 million in bridge funding from investors including UK firms A...
Future Food News Review #5: Food system cyber-attacks, Avoiding alt protein’s unintended consequences, Cashierless checkout's growth
June 24, 2021 09:39 - 1 hour - 73.8 MBThe Future Food News Review is part of a collaboration between AgFunder and Food+Tech Connect to host meaningful conversations about the future of our food system on Clubhouse and other platforms. The Future Food News Review features leading journalists in foodtech and agtech sharing and discussing their top headlines of the week, hosted on Clubhouse. See below for a list of participating journalists and the articles they introduced; some of them joined purely for the discussion and debate...
Future Food News Review #4: Regenerative agriculture's reckoning, Questions for cell-cultured meat, Right-wing coffee, more
May 19, 2021 13:00 - 1 hour - 87.6 MBThe Future Food News Review is part of a collaboration between AgFunder and Food+Tech Connect to host meaningful conversations about the future of our food system on Clubhouse and other platforms. The Future Food News Review features leading journalists in foodtech and agtech sharing and discussing their top headlines of the week, hosted on Clubhouse. See below for a list of participating journalists and the articles they introduced; some of them joined purely for the discussion and debate...
Up, up and away! Irving Fain on building Bowery's biggest vertical farm yet
May 18, 2021 10:41 - 36 minutes - 33.7 MBBowery has just launched FarmX, its new vertical farm for R&D that's 300 times larger than the first. It's also building a new, bigger than ever commercial farm in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania which will enable it to sell over 20 million clamshells of leafy greens and produce each year. While that's still the equivalent of just 115 acres of outdoor farmland, it's certainly a turning point and year-over-year growth is significant; since January 2020, the company has increased its brick-and-mortar ...
From chemicals to soil microbes: Bayer's former CEO joins AgBiome
May 14, 2021 11:56 - 48 minutes - 44.2 MBCrop protection is a serious business; each year a farmer battles a range of different pests, weeds and diseases trying to kill their harvest. It's complicated too, with timing and weather other forces to contend with. Since the Second World War and the Green Revolution of the 1960s, the playbook for managing pests, by and large, has revolved around a combination of chemical applications at various point during the year together with synthetic fertilizers, and in the US, genetically modifie...
How do you make the world's most ambitious cheese?
May 11, 2021 11:26 - 36 minutes - 33.1 MBThe Stockeld Chunk will be the first in a series of cheese products from Stockeld Dreamery this year and I really enjoyed it! Listen in to hear my thoughts about the cheese, why Sorosh Tavakoli, an advertising tech entrepreneur got into foodtech, how to build the most ambitious cheese company in the world (his phrase, not mine), without cows, moving beyond nuts as the key ingredient in plant-based cheese, and creating a simple, healthy alternative to dairy cheese with just a few ingredients....
Future Food News Review #3: Amazon's new private label food brand, Unabated meat consumption, SPACs for foodtech
April 19, 2021 13:40 - 1 hour - 83.8 MBThe Future Food News Review is part of a collaboration between AgFunder and Food+Tech Connect to host meaningful conversations about the future of our food system on Clubhouse and other platforms. The journalists joining this week are: Ximena Bustillo - POLITICO (https://www.politico.com/newsletters/weekly-agriculture) Sam Silverstein - Grocery Dive (https://www.grocerydive.com/news/amazon-unveils-aplenty-its-newest-private-label-food-brand/598223/) Leah Douglas - FERN (https://www.mothe...
Future Food News Review #2: Impossible's $10bn IPO, Vegan Cheese, CRISPR Tomatoes
April 12, 2021 13:37 - 1 hour - 69.1 MBThe journalists joining us this week were: Joe Fassler - The Counter (https://thecounter.org/agrivoltaics-farmland-solar-panels-clean-energy-crops/) Sarah Mock - freelance (https://sarah-k-mock.medium.com/no-your-great-grandfather-did-not-know-how-to-fix-our-food-system-83775d4f1852) Larissa Zimberoff - Bloomberg and freelance (https://technicallyfood.substack.com/p/gene-editing-our-precious-tomato) Sonalie Figueras - Green Queen Media (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-impossible-foods...
Reaching net-zero emissions by 2040 with PepsiCo
April 06, 2021 17:04 - 30 minutes - 28 MBPepsiCo started the year with a bang by pledging to more than double its climate goal, targeting a reduction of absolute greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across its value chain by more than 40% by 2030. It also pledged to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040, one decade earlier than called for in the Paris Agreement. But how exactly is the company going to achieve this? And what role does technology play across its convoluted supply chain globally?
The Future Food News Review with Food Tech's Leading Journalists
March 29, 2021 19:20 - 1 hour - 103 MBWe're mixing things up here at Future Food and have partnered with Danielle Gould from Food+Tech Connect to host deep discussions about the future of our food system and we're going to be bringing those conversations to the Future Food podcast. Expect fireside chats, book clubs, and the format for this episode, the Future Food News Review. The weekly Future Food News Review features leading journalists in foodtech and agtech sharing and discussing their top headlines of the week, hosted on...
JUST how this startup became the first to serve cell-cultured meat in a restaurant
March 23, 2021 17:05 - 35 minutes - 32.2 MBTopics covered include: how EAT JUST managed to get regulatory approval ahead of other cultivated meat startups from plant-based to cell culturing how investors reached a $1bn valuation for the company new formats in the pipeline advice for entrepreneurs Josh's moonshot idea
Is this the fastest-growing vertical farming business in the world?
March 11, 2021 15:00 - 28 minutes - 25.7 MBWhen I returned from maternity leave in January, I reached out to my good friend Henry Gordon-Smith from Agritecture to find out what I'd missed and what sort of traction the highly funded startups were really getting. When thinking about which company was making the greatest strides, Henry highlighted Infarm, the Berlin-based vertical farming group with more than $300m in funding under its belt. Infarm's global footprint has expanded rapidly in recent months with its in-store units cropping...
How can robotics startups respond to the urgent need for automation in the food industry?
July 27, 2020 17:16 - 48 minutes - 44 MBLabor shortages are nothing new to the agriculture industry and COVID-19 has excerbated this already existing problem. Is it sustainable and efficient to import labor from other countries like the US and the UK do? The time for automation in the food and agriculture industry is now. But are the robots ready to be unleashed? Our recent webinar with Josh Lessing from RootAI and Igino Cafiero Bear Flag Robotics tackles the inherent challenges of the space, and how to improve it forward in a ...
Foodtech & sustainability in Asia amid food security challenges
July 17, 2020 21:01 - 50 minutes - 46.5 MBCovid-19 started in Asia, and the region was the first to feel the social and economic impacts of the disease as it spread worldwide. It’s also where businesses, entrepreneurs, investors, and governments have spent the most time dealing with Covid-19 and its effects. Their insights and experience – and the strategies they’ve adopted to ride out the pandemic – could prove invaluable to agrifood players not just in Asia, but elsewhere in the world, too. That’s why we focused the second episod...
From software to regenerative agriculture, SoilWorks believes the key to better health is in the ground
July 06, 2020 08:19 - 38 minutes - 34.8 MBIn this episode of Future Food, which I co-hosted with my wonderful colleague Lauren Stine, our reporter and resident rancher, we talk to Lew Moorman and Nick Honegger of Soilworks, a newly-created investment group focused on regenerative agriculture. Nick and Lew founded SoilWorks after working together at Scaleworks, the B2B SaaS focused investment organization founded by Lew. We talk about how they moved into the very different world of regenerative agriculture, what regen ag means to th...
Digging into the future and sustainability of protein in our diets
June 24, 2020 08:16 - 43 minutes - 40 MBThe importance of protein in our diets is hardly breaking news; demand for high-protein diets is increasing globally. When you combine the developing world’s desire to replace staple grains — that have dominated their diets for centuries — with increasing amounts of animal-based protein, with the over-consumption of meat and protein in the developed world, alongside a growing desire in multiple corners of the world to eat fewer animal-based products, there’s clear pressure on the globe’s pr...
How the digitalization of agriculture will increase food's sustainability
June 18, 2020 08:14 - 32 minutes - 29.9 MBHow does an environmentalist become an aerial imagery data analytics and AI entrepreneur? Find out in this episode with Al Eisaian, a serial entrepreneur from the mobile apps and software space. Al's company IntelinAir uses images captured from airplanes to help farmers identify problem areas in their fields and make decisions that can reduce the burden of their activities on the environment, such as water usage, pesticide usage and so on. It can also importantly help increase the efficienc...
The future of agrifood investing in the wake of Covid-19
June 06, 2020 08:12 - 46 minutes - 42.7 MBCovid-19 is the first big crisis for agrifood investing, an investment area that largely emerged in the wake of the global financial crisis. How will investors respond and what does it mean for the future of investment across the sector? This is part of a new series of webinars AgFunder is hosting to navigate the crisis. This first episode features Dave Friedberg, founder of The Climate Corporation, agtech's first unicorn which sold to Monsanto for $1bn, and Blake Stevens, principal at A...
Oatly co-founder on scaling alt milk and the need for local food production
June 01, 2020 20:56 - 43 minutes - 39.8 MBIn this episode, I speak to Bjorn Oste, who cofounded Oatly, the dairy alternative company that recently saw its flagship oat milk product fly off the shelves during the first weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic due to its shelf-stable nature. Bjorn is such fun and candid and tells a great story of the founding of Oatly with his brother and the fantastic, ESG-oriented company it is today complete, with quirky and bold branding often seen adorned on the side of buses. We actually recorded this ju...
How to clean your house with food waste
May 19, 2020 18:54 - 28 minutes - 26.3 MBAmanda Weeks is converting food waste into a natural house cleaner. With her startup Ambrosia, that recently re-branded from Industrial/Organic, Amanda has been recycling food waste for many years and after an initial focus on making fertilizer, almost accidentally came across the byproduct's cleaning properties. I catch up with Amanda nearly 5 years after we first met to find out more about the re-brand, the new product line Veles, and the challenges she's faced in building this business.
Digging into dairy sustainability with Danone & Connecterra
April 29, 2020 18:23 - 34 minutes - 31.3 MBYou’re forgiven if you missed Earth Day last week. I’m sure sustainability and climate change are far from many people’s minds right now as you grapple with a new normal that might involve sick loved ones, loss of a job, or serious challenges in your day-to-day life. Of course, our planet continues to face the same environmental challenges it did before the pandemic. Danone, the French multinational yogurt and dairy products company, certainly agrees; the company, a classified B-Corp, i...
Milk from peas? Method co-founder Adam Lowry on making protein and learning from mistakes
February 13, 2020 16:49 - 24 minutes - 22.6 MBClimate scientist, inventor and founder of two sustainable businesses, Adam Lowry is currently CEO of Ripple Foods, a dairy-free milk products company. His first company was Method, the sustainable cleaning products brand that's now a household name. We talk about the contrast between launching a cleaning products business and a food business, why food was the next step for him, the key mistakes and lessons learned from Method, how he and his colleagues chose the pea as the key ingredient ...
Pork Tech, ASF, Transparency: how are your sausages grown?
January 28, 2020 20:43 - 28 minutes - 26.1 MBIn a world of African Swine Fever, increasing scrutiny of the meat industry and consumer demand for transparency, the pork industry needs to modernize. But according to Chris Bomgaars, founder of EveryPig, a software platform for pork producers to track pig health, moving away from the pen + paper records that still dominate, many in the industry are reticent to do so. Find out why -- and what they think of the growing number of meat alternatives on the market -- in this episode.
Why foodtech and agtech VC? I ask AgFunder's investment team
January 09, 2020 15:54 - 18 minutes - 17.2 MBWhy work in the foodtech and agtech investment space? Which category of this emerging venture capital industry are most exciting? These are some of the questions I asked two of my teammates Yanniv and Quinten who joined AgFunder in 2019. Also find out who their favorite team member is - hint - it's me!
2020 Special: AgFunder's Rob Leclerc on the last decade in ag and foodtech
December 23, 2019 16:54 - 30 minutes - 28.1 MBThis episode is perhaps a tad awkward as I interview my boss Rob Leclerc, founding partner of AgFunder, but Rob was as insightful as ever, sharing his thoughts on working in and around the agriculture sector for the past decade. Rob first started working with our other founding partner Michael Dean when they set up an agriculture business in West Africa at the start of the decade before founding AgFunder in 2013. We talk about agtech acquisitions, food trends, the impending shift to look...
Alt proteins: Catching up with GFI's Bruce Friedrich
December 12, 2019 03:09 - 27 minutes - 25 MBIn this episode, I speak to Bruce Friedrich, the executive director and co-founder of the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit that promotes plant-based alternatives to meat, dairy, and eggs, as well as those using cellular agriculture to produce replicas of these animal-based products at the cellular level, without any animal involvement. GFI engages scientists, policymakers, and entrepreneurs to advance the creation and adoption of these food products by producing research and a range of...
Who's responsible for obesity? And why Futurist Jack Bobo is pro-traditions
November 06, 2019 21:38 - 20 minutes - 18.4 MBIn this episode I speak to Jack Bobo, founder of Futurity, a consultancy firm for startups and established food brands to consider the future of food and what it means to them. "I'm very optimistic and excited about what the world will look like in 2050 but I think it is helpful though to think about where we've come from in order to think about where we're going." Tune in to hear why Jack think CBD is not hot and the problem with fad diets and why the sugar tax on sodas - fizzy drinks ...
Klaus Kunz tells us how Bayer is cleaning up its act
September 23, 2019 20:30 - 26 minutes - 24.6 MBIn this episode of Future Food, I speak to Klaus Kunz, head of Sustainability and Business Stewardship at German agro-pharma giant Bayer on the sidelines of the Seed & Chips Innovation Summit in Milan. We talk on many topics including smallholder farmers, concerning data regarding biodiversity but one can’t get through a conversation with Bayer without addressing its pesticides. The company has come under serious fire for its glyphosate-based weedkiller Roundup, which is made by its now-su...
From the moment we're born, we're going to know exactly what foods we should eat, for what purpose
July 29, 2019 13:08 - 28 minutes - 20.1 MBSofia Elizondo started her career as a management consultant in New York and after attending Stanford business school, discovered the world of food tech. She cofounded Brightseed in Silicon Valley to unlock the potential for plants to positively impact our health. In this episode, we discuss the vast untapped potential of the natural world for our nutrition; just 15 of the 50,000 edible plants on the earth provide 90% of our calories! So Sofia founded Brightseed to unearth the bioactive co...
Consumer Signals Influence the Biggest Agtech Startup: Indigo Ag
July 04, 2019 00:41 - 43 minutes - 40.9 MBIn this episode of Future Food, I speak to Jennifer Betka, the chief marketing officer of Indigo Agriculture, the Boston-based agtech startup that's one of the highest valued in the industry today. Jennifer is an expert marketer with a career spanning many different industries outside of agriculture, most recently at StubHub the event ticketing business, so it's really interesting to hear about her transition into this industry. Jennifer does a great job explaining the work of Indigo tha...
A Moonshot Idea for Avocados? Nadia El Hadery from UK's YFood Shares Her FoodTech Journey
May 14, 2019 10:15 - 29 minutes - 28.3 MBThe UK is the most active ecosystem for foodtech and agtech startups in Europe and Nadia El Hadery has played a role in it from London since 2013. Nadia is founder and CEO of YFood, an event and media company focused on the industry. London FoodTech Week is next week - find out more about the event, Nadia's vision for the future of food -- including drones and personalized food delivery -- her love of avocados, and some of the challenges startups have faced in the UK and beyond.
How Whole Foods' Walter Robb Thinks about Food Tech and the Future of Grocery
May 01, 2019 20:13 - 47 minutes - 43.2 MBThere's perhaps no deal more representative of the changes taking place in the food system, and the meeting of technology and food, than Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017. Walter Robb, the former co-CEO of Whole Foods, was a key player through the transaction and for many years at Whole Foods before it. A proponent of whole and natural foods, Walter is increasingly exposed to new food technologies through his work as executive-in-residence at agrifood tech investment firm S2G ...
What is the Future of Food? CEO of Agtech's 1st Unicorn David Friedberg Offers His Vision
February 28, 2019 15:45 - 56 minutes - 52.1 MBFor entrepreneurs and investors in the agtech startup space, David Friedberg is a major celebrity. When he sold his weather data startup The Climate Corporation to Monsanto for $1 billion in 2013 - achieving that elusive "unicorn" status - he put the category on the map. Ever since, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have flocked to apply the latest in technology to the food and agriculture industries in an effort to cure it of its many woes, including climate change, obesity and the domi...
How are Food Corporates Interacting with Startup Innovation and Are We Headed for Margarine 2.0?
August 06, 2018 11:30 - 34 minutes - 31.8 MBIn this podcast, Louisa talks to Nick Fereday, a consumer foods analyst at Rabobank, about how the large food and agriculture companies are reacting to new innovation and working with startups. They also talk about the acquisition of Whole Foods by Amazon, and consumer trends around natural, simple food as well as alternative meat products.
Consumer Preferences and the Role of Women in Food & Ag Innovation
July 30, 2018 11:30 - 40 minutes - 36.9 MBWomen still make the majority of food decisions in the home -- around 65% according to some estimates. While this has fallen from over 95% 20 years ago, women are still underrepresented in leading roles at food companies globally. I this week’s podcast, Louisa discusses the impact of this underrepresentation and how tech innovation is adapting to consumer demands with Beth Robertson-Martin, sourcing lead for organic, natural and non-GMO ingredients at General Mills, Kellee James, founder of ...
How an Artificial Intelligence & Robotics Startup Got Acquired by John Deere
July 16, 2018 11:30 - 35 minutes - 32.3 MBBlue River Technology is a Silicon Valley startup bringing robotics to the farm. In August 2017, Blue River was acquired by John Deere, the world’s largest tractor company, for $305 million. This was extremely exciting news for the agtech industry as exits for the venture capital firms backing the sector have been relatively few and far between. In this episode, Louisa speaks to Jorge Heraud, founder and CEO of the company about the startup's journey to success.
What Does Obama Think About Food Technology?
July 02, 2018 11:30 - 35 minutes - 32.4 MBIn this episode, Louisa speaks to Sam Kass, venture partner at Acre Venture Partners, the food system venture capital firm. Kass has had a varied career working as a chef in the White House, as well as a nutritional policy advisor, and launched the Let's Move campaign with Michelle Obama. Here he speaks about investing in food technology and the importance of access to nutritional food.
Plenty Vertical Farming: From Stealth to Raising $200m
June 18, 2018 15:22 - 26 minutes - 24.3 MBAfter a few years in stealth mode, vertical farming group Plenty hit the public domain with a bang, raising a record-breaking $200m from Japanese banking group SoftBank over the summer. Louisa talks to CEO Matt Barnard to hear more about the company's growth and future plans.