FoodTech in Germany
So, is Germany the heart of Europe’s FoodTech?
We have the tendency to sum up Germany’s FoodTech to Delivery Hero, Hello Fresh and sometimes Marley Spoon. Three startups that have been met with success mostly outside of Germany (in Asia and South America for Delivery Hero, in the US for Hello Fresh and in Australia for Marley Spoon). Hence, it is possible to be quite sceptical about Germany’s ecosystem. However, in this report we were wondering how such world leaders can have been built there and if Germans had a magic equation to build FoodTech Unicorns that could be replicated in other European countries.
Indeed, Delivery Hero and HelloFresh have risen to the status of unicorns and global players. With them, Germany has 2 of the 4 European (the others are UK based Deliveroo and Netherlands’ TakeAway) startups that account for more than 60% of the private investments made since 2014 in European FoodTech startups. This has made Germany an easy number 1 in terms of money invested in FoodTech startups in the last four years.
Reading the German scene behind these two leaders is not as easy as in other countries due to a more scattered ecosystem (even if Berlin is leading). With enough care, we can see the emergence of new startups following (or even being at the origin of) the hottest FoodTech trends such as cloud kitchens (Keatz, eatClever), Urban Farming (InFarm) or product innovation (Yfood).
In our report, you will discover the 225 German FoodTech startups, in which domain they are and how the €2.8B invested between 2014 and 2018 are distributed.
Germany’s FoodTech startups are diverse and some of the startups selected here have a clear unicorn potential, which is really impressive when we compare it to the number of active startups. Indeed with 225 active startups, we have found half as startups in Germany as in the UK or France.
Germany’s FoodTech startups are diverse but there is one domain bigger than others. Indeed, Germany’s FoodTech is not balanced when looking at active startups. We can see a clear (and surprising) majority of FoodScience products that represent 54% of the startups. The domain just behind is the delivery domain which represents 21% of the German FoodTech startups.
