Hello everyone to solve cast. my name is Morten Seja and I'm here today with Daniel Ruben, a FoodTech advisor based in Stockholm, but I'm not going to talk too much. Daniel, why don't you introduce yourself a little bit.
Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. so I work on the future of food and food tech. I'm an advisor to the food team or the Rockefeller foundation. I'm a mentor to a couple of food tech accelerators. I'm an operating experts at a couple of food tech VCs. I run a food tech newsletter called food tech weekly, and I'm also an advisor, an angel investor in about 10 food tech companies in Europe, the us and Africa.
so you're doing everything possible around food tickets. Sounds like that's really exciting. Can you give us a high level overview of the trends for the future of food?
Yeah, that's obviously a. Really hard, but I think we're seeing a lot of them entrepreneurs trying to solve some of the greatest challenges facing the food system today. So when we built the modern food system, it's really all about eradicating hunger and under nourishment and famines. And, we were largely successful.
So even though the population increased two and a half times between 1960 and today we increased, food production and yields much faster, but we optimize the food system for cheap calories, meaning. That we didn't focus on feeding, nourishing people, but actually feeding people calories. And that's meant that today, the number one risk factor for disease, disability and premature death, is, diets, poor diets. so one in five deaths, 10 million people each year. And that's, cardiovascular disease.
high BMI, high blood pressure, certain forms of stroke and cancer, all diet related. And, on top of that, we have all the environmental issues where the food system uses 70% of fresh water, half of vegetative land, it's responsible for maybe a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. there's the w our relationship with animals, the way we race livestock and animals for food, which, triggers pandemics.
so there's a lot of issues with the food system and a lot of innovators and entrepreneurs are trying to solve these through innovation and, leveraging technology, to make the food system more nourishing, more environment, environmentally sustainable, and more resilient.
Could you name maybe one to three of your favorite startups that you've seen trying to disrupt this whole food tech space or the whole, I guess also health space
in that sense. Oh, that's incredibly hard. if you, Because billions of dollars are being invested in this. And there are thousands of, ag tech and food tech deals every year, but there are three big things we need to solve for the food system. We need to increase productivity in some emerging markets. We need to reduce post-harvest food loss and food waste. So 30% of the food grown in poor countries don't reach the consumers. And in rich countries, 30% of food boxes is discarded, not eaten.
And we need to shift diets towards diets. There are more nourishing and more environmentally sustainable. So I think I'm really excited about what I'm seeing in the alternative protein space. and I'm talking to you, protein can be anything really from plant-based foods cell-based or lab grown foods, but also alternative animal feeds alternatives to say soy and fishmeal. so one example of course, is impossible foods with our plant-based burgers.
And what's exciting about them is that they're doing a very good job mimicking the whole experience of animal sourced meat. so the price that tastes convenience, everything. and there are many other plant-based, companies in the sort of meat, dairy, and egg space that are growing everywhere. Another example, is alternative animal feeds.
instead of using soy and fishmeal startups are working on things like algae, single cell proteins, algae as a way of feeding animals and doing so in a more sustainable way. one example is, Protix in the Netherlands. they can source things like food waste, old fruits and vegetables. the insects will eat this and then the insects can be fed to egg laying hands, for example. So you have a more circular, circular food system.
In another example, in the food waste space, which is exciting, I think it's, Apeel sciences from California. They developed this, invisible coding around fruits and vegetables. It's organic. It's transparent. It doesn't taste anything, but it increases the shelf life of fruits and vegetables.
Two, three, four X. So basically, slowing down the process whereby the fruit or vegetable, dehydrates and stopping air from coming in and thus reducing the need for plastics to protect the fruits and vegetables, and also increased in shelf life. So it's good for so many reasons.
so there are plenty exciting startups all over, even though there are some leading ecosystems, there are plenty of exciting startups doing great things right now that I think really will help move the food system in a better direction.
absolutely incredible. and I think this is probably, a whole topic for another talk we should have on specific ideas there. anyhow, how do you think agriculture will change over the next decades? You've already mentioned that agriculture has really picked up with the growth of people, but now with the growth of, or change in demand, change in opportunities, how is agriculture going to change in the
future? Yeah. So agriculture of course has always changed. And even up until maybe 200 years ago, most of us still worked in agriculture and today, very few people, at least in the Western world work in agriculture because we're more efficient, so we can produce more food. I using fewer people and I think that trend will continue. So we'll see more. automation, we'll see, send source, AI and data and machine learning.
we'll see a lot more systems that will help farmers to understand what's going on from satellites to drones, to sensory stick in the ground. Automation and drones that can help, with, reducing, pesticides and herbicides. So that can actually target, the weeds, and also reduce the need for farm labor. this labor is really hard, especially the high touch crops, like strawberries and peppers and so on. can be expensive to have foreign labor.
It can be tough work, and also, hard to get farm labor with COVID. We saw a lot of border closures, meaning, countries like the UK, France, Sweden, the U S others had trouble sourcing enough farm labor. So I think we'll have more automation that will help farmers. with this sort of, planting and weeding and harvesting and farmers will have more, intelligence that will help them make better decisions and all of this, of course, to reduce the environmental, impact of, agricultural production.
and hopefully also enable us to grow more nutritious foods.
No, very interesting. I want to come back to. You talk about protein alternatives and I'm just very curious. How do you get customers to accept fully these new, new food items? Quote, unquote, repackaged, be packaged meat, for example, which isn't meat anymore. how do you get the mindset shift with
within consumers? And diets are sticky and food is so integral to who we are. we are what we eat and food is joy. It's community it's culture. It tells us where we're coming from, where we are, where we want to go. So food is pretty Holy, and food can bring us together, but also can be very polarizing. So I think you need to, You need to go carefully and educate people and inform people what you want to do and why. it also depends what you want for the food system.
whether you care about livelihoods or environment or nutrition or resilience equity, then you might employ different things and go for different types of foods. beyond the sort of technical obstacles and regulatory obstacles, you also have consumer acceptance obstacles, will consumers accept these new types of foods, whether it's, insects in animal feed or eating insects, as flour in bread, for example, eating plant-based or cell-based. So lab grown. Meat dairy and egg, products.
we didn't really know diets are sticky, but diets also change. I'd say 50 years ago, most people didn't eat sushi and pod Thai and today a lot of people in Western countries do, so diets change, what we eat change, Over time. I think we'll have a, just a plethora of different alternatives. And another thing is I think we're going to be able to personalize nutrition and at a whole different level compared to today.
So today we know on a population level that we should eat more fruits and vegetables and whole grains and seeds and nuts and omega-3 or fish. And we should eat less or no trans fats, saturated fats, sugar, sodium, processed meats.
we know that on a population level, we don't really know what's best for you and I in the faces we're in, in our lives, but we're going to be able to personalize nutrition in the future, whether it's by swallowing a sensor or having a breathalyzer, we'll have a greater understanding of the gut microbiome, how the food we eat, interact with our bodies and what we really need.
So I think that will also help push some consumers instead certain direction when you can actually measure your body and see, this is bad for me, or this is good for me. This is, making me healthier or this is making you sick. When you have that more granular understanding, then I think there's also different acceptance to, to eating more of certain foods or less of other foods, this sort of greater understanding of how food impacts us and our bodies.
Well, Daniel, this has been extremely interesting and I'm sure I'm speaking for all the listeners saying that this is it's subject ever evolving and super interesting for everyone. We all eat. Most of us really enjoy eating and learning about the future is super interesting. I highly recommend subscribing to your newsletter. I've been doing it for a long time now and I thoroughly enjoy reading it every Friday. super interesting. And, thank you very much again and hope to have you on the show
soon again. Thank you so much, Martin.