Prince Khaled bin Alwaleed of Saudi Arabia, the founder and CEO of KBW Ventures, is to join other industry leaders at the San Francisco Future Food Tech Summit 2022. This year’s event will take place on March 24-25.
First FFT summit since pandemic
It will be the first time the summit has taken place in person since the beginning of the pandemic, featuring 1,000 delegates and 120 speakers from 40 countries. The event aims to bring together developing and established food brands with investors, supply chain companies, industry experts, and more.
Prince Khaled will be involved as a member of the Future Food Tech Summit’s advisory board, helping to decide the content and priorities for the event. He will also participate in a panel discussion with other investors, including those from IndieBio, Lux Capital, and Pontifax.
The Prince said KBW Ventures would be actively looking for supply chain and ingredient ventures, as well as continuing to back cultivated and precision fermentation companies.
Previous Future Food Tech Summits have showcased game-changing startups such as Israel’s Yo-Egg and South Africa’s De Novo Dairy. They have also illustrated powerful technologies like precision fermentation.
Prince Khaled and the plant-based sector
Prince Khaled is well-known for being a vegan advocate, and several of KBW Ventures’ portfolio companies are plant-based or cultivated — including Beyond Meat, Bond Pet Foods, BlueNalu, and Rebellyous.
Last October, KBW partnered with chef Matthew Kenney in Saudi Arabia to launch multi-course plant-based menus made with local ingredients. Additionally, Prince Khaled serves on the Advisory Board of XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion Challenge which aims to award $15 million to startups working on alt protein fish filet or chicken breast.
As well as the Future Food Tech Summit, Prince Khaled has also taken part in other events looking to shape the future of food, including the 2021 World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit.
“If one person decides to go for a plant-based burger over a factory-farmed one, I’m happy,” Prince Khaled told vegconomist in an interview. “That’s one more person through the gate. I’ve had a lot of people on social media talk about how they have gone vegan or at the very least they are now flexitarian and filtering animal products out more and more often.”
