Alex Crisp, writer and host of Future of Foods Interviews speaks to Marie Brueser from EIT Food on this latest podcast episode.
EIT Food is charged with accelerating and driving innovation in the EU by using all the means at its disposal – including significant early-stage investment, and is described as a pan-European organization dedicated to driving innovation and entrepreneurship across the food sector to create a more sustainable and healthy food system.
Supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), EIT Food brings together stakeholders from across the entire food value chain—including agritech startups, industry giants, research institutions, and universities.
Brueser highlights exciting areas including generative AI for food data applications, advancements in plant genetics for faster breeding, and precision fermentation, notably enhancing alternative proteins with better cost and time efficiency. EIT Food also observes growth in bio-based agricultural inputs and alternative ingredients like sugar and palm oil substitutes.
Alex: What are some of the most exciting new food technologies and innovations that you’ve helped or have seen emerge recently?
Brueser: Because I do this corporate startup matchmaking, I get to see a really big breadth of that ecosystem. EIT food gets more than a thousand applicants every year so we really get a good feel for what’s out there. What’s exciting for me right now is a lot of what can be done with generative AI the larger data crunching that we can do. Chat GPT came out almost two years ago now so we’re seeing startups come up with innovations within that and using that to solve problems.
On the agriculture side there’s a lot happening in plant genetics – plant breeding that’s had a revival since we can crunch a little bit more data, more information and put that together and get outputs faster. We can turn it into faster breeding technologies, faster varieties in the market. Data can be used on the food side too, for example substituting ingredients or bringing in new flavours, because you can do a lot of the work online to figure out what things will taste like or what mixes will be really good, will be nutritious and delicious.
And so we also have a lot of supporting technologies within that space for example precision fermentation.
We can agree the technology that’s here to stay, it’s being used a lot in the alternative protein products but we’re now having startups that help map out what happens in that fermenter so that we can get a lot faster to where we want to be, plan that a lot better; obviously cutting costs but also time.
We’ll wait and see how that plays out because now it’s the smaller ones that have a chance to dive into this a little bit further, a little bit earlier. The question is what will it look like in a few years when they need data to keep growing the models but then a lot of the data sits within those big corporates that may not want it to be mixed with others. So we’ll see how that plays out. I think that’s exciting right now.
And to leave the digital realm, in bio inputs, a lot is happening there on the agriculture side and then on the food side, it’s new ingredients especially sugar alternatives, fat alternatives, so going away from palm oil for example – and chocolate alternatives as well. I think we’re seeing exciting things that taste really good.
Alex: So what are the key qualities that you look for when selecting a startup to support?
Brueser: So EIT Food has three startup programs, so we start really early with Seedbeds, our incubators, so these are teams that aren’t necessarily registered yet, so a lot of master’s students, PhD students, so we have a lens on that, on that technology component. So something novel that hasn’t been done before, possibly protectable or ideally protectable and something new, obviously sustainability and with impact at the heart of it as well.
We then have an accelerator, where it’s that next level up.
Then that personalised support system in the Rising Food stars where it’s really around raising that series A, scaling internationally, and getting a lot of visibility in the ecosystem.
So within that it’s always about a great team, that the people behind it understand the problems, that you can feel the passion they have to solve the problems but also with a technology that makes sense, that is affordable, that’s exciting and that’s novel, so I think that’s kind of what we look for.
Alex: How do you help? You’ve talked about scale up and about getting the news out, so are you also an administrative support or are you linking them to people who might help them?
Brueser: Yeah, so for sure we’re linking people, we’re also giving knowledge. There’s a lot there and all our programs, everything we do at EIT Food, we do with our partners. We have a great ecosystem coming in. As soon as the startup has been accepted, which is quite a journey, as they get looked at by various experts and are only then invited for interviews.
We support around 120 startups in those three programs that I mentioned, every year. They get support in terms of sessions and knowledge, they get connected with the research institutes and universities, but also corporate partners and then of course also the investment piece. We as EIT Food can invest. Our pipeline is the startups in our programs, that’s the first step, but then we can invest in them but it’s also the ecosystem that comes behind it.
It then gets quite specific depending on what program you’re in, so Seedbed is focused a lot on that market discovery, so finding what is ‘that’ problem, what does the business model look like, and then that support and what does it look like to even to be a startup, to run a startup as almost half of the companies we support are not registered yet within that program.
And then, if I can share a little bit more about our accelerator, that one is set up a little bit differently and I think really excitingly because it brings those strengths of ecosystem together, so it’s a great way to set up a new ecosystem together. So what we do there is the startups throughout the programs work on their tech validation, so instead of in most other programs at the end you pitch an investor pitch, for us you pitch your tech validation, so that’s whatever you need to go from where you are, to that next level. That can be a field trial, it can be scaling production, it can be trying out a new formulation – and we connect you to research institutes and universities in our ecosystem that might be able you to do that. And we then also give out grants to some of the startups, so the top three get funding to actually do that, and so that obviously drives that faster route to market as well. So that’s a really nice one and then visibility, yes, so we take our startups to events, we help them have booths, we also then help position themselves in terms of interviews, programming, and of course our own events as well.
Alex: So when you said you can invest in the companies, how much can you invest in the startups?
Bruser: It’s actually not in my team, so our corporate venturing team is really around collaboration with corporates. We have our investment team that drives this, so we invest using SAFE, so these are convertible notes, somewhere between 500k and 1.5 million, and that can be a bridge round, that can be a C to series A, but we don’t really go beyond that. We might do follow-on investments as well, but that’s kind of the realm we work in, and then again it’s our ecosystem that we can bring in, so then we connect you to help raise that follow-on round as well, so it’s really that support that comes in there.
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Audio link on Substack – https://open.substack.com/pub/alexcrisp/p/bringing-the-elements-together-for?r=a2hrt&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
