From 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 Food pod...
Nov 09, 2023•24 min•Ep. 37
In 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/wypfu...
May 26, 2022•25 min•Ep. 36
A 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 turne...
Oct 22, 2021•36 min•Ep. 35
Amy 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.
Oct 15, 2021•30 min•Ep. 34
Since 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 Agron...
Jun 25, 2021•40 min•Ep. 32
The 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. We a...
Jun 24, 2021•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 33
The 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. We a...
May 19, 2021•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 31
Bowery 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 ...
May 18, 2021•37 min•Ep. 30
Crop 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 modified see...
May 14, 2021•48 min•Ep. 29
The 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....
May 11, 2021•36 min•Ep. 28
The 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.motherjon...
Apr 19, 2021•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 27
The 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-m-...
Apr 12, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 26
PepsiCo 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?...
Apr 06, 2021•31 min•Ep. 25
We'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 Clubh...
Mar 29, 2021•1 hr 53 min•Ep. 24
Topics 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
Mar 23, 2021•35 min•Ep. 23
When 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 up ...
Mar 11, 2021•28 min•Ep. 22
Labor 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 post-CO...
Jul 27, 2020•48 min•Ep. 21
Covid-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 episode of ...
Jul 17, 2020•51 min•Ep. 20
In 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 them,...
Jul 06, 2020•38 min•Ep. 19
The 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 protein...
Jun 24, 2020•44 min•Ep. 18
How 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 efficiency and...
Jun 18, 2020•33 min•Ep. 17
Covid-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 Alexandri...
Jun 06, 2020•47 min•Ep. 16
In 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 just as...
Jun 01, 2020•43 min•Ep. 15
Amanda 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....
May 19, 2020•29 min•Ep. 14
You’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, is a fron...
Apr 29, 2020•34 min•Ep. 13
Climate 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 for th...
Feb 13, 2020•25 min•Ep. 12
In 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.
Jan 28, 2020•29 min•Ep. 11
Why 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!
Jan 09, 2020•19 min•Ep. 10
This 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 at food...
Dec 23, 2019•31 min•Ep. 9
In 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 res...
Dec 12, 2019•27 min•Ep. 8
