Hi,
We have recently released a report on FoodTech trends. The main questions our (mostly corporates) customers have asked us is “how did you choose these 8 trends?”. That’s a fair question indeed. However, most have been surprised by our answer that if these trends come from our data and insights, we have selected the ones that will have the biggest impact on the current food big players (if they ignore them). We don’t believe this change will happen smoothly. For each of these trends, there will be a tipping point where :
- the new players will grow extremely fast, become profitable and become leaders
- it will be too late for the “old” players that were not prepared (some will survive, some may disappear)
For decades, food corporates and retailers have used old recipes such as huge mergers (in order to kill costs). These recipes don’t work anymore. We just have to look at Kraft Heinz to have a proof. Food corporates and retailers have to reinvent themselves and this will come from :
- new business models which don’t mean that creating D2C (direct-to-consumer) streams will be sufficient
- new products (versus year-to-year improvement of your current products) and technologies
- new markets or demographics
- new ways to manage an ever more complicated supply chains
- new competitors and new key partners
The last point is key. Corporates should look for startups for new technology partners, solution providers and most of all for inspiration. Looking at startups doesn’t mean you have to work with them (or even invest in them) but you still have to look at what they do because they:
- work fast and cheap
- launch a lot of innovation that fails and can prevent you from spending huge amounts of money on useless projects
- sometimes converge on something big you should not ignore
In a world where Burger King’s Whooper is becoming vegan with the help of Impossible foods, itself backed by meat giant Tyson Foods, we can see that disruption is just at the beginning. The question now is: “on which side will you be?”, “disruptor or disrupted?” If there is no magical way to avoid disruption, you can be certain to be disrupted if you don’t look at these new ventures and where they go.
Have a great week!
Matthieu
Big deals
Ezcater, the business catering startup, just raised $150m and gets to the unicorn status with a $1.25B valuation. The company has grown fast, from bootstrapping in 2011 to a catering leader.
Singapore is allocating public funding to clean (cellular or lab-grown) meat. As for Israel, Singapore’s motives are about autonomy and food-independance from its neighbors.
Top News (success stories)
If you don’t know brandless, it’s about time. Brandless: building the convenience brand of the future. This DNVB brand is very different from most of the startups. Rather than developing one fancy and specific products, it aims at developing one product for every need. This article is about the process of designing a brand that is about avoiding branding.
RXBar: going from a $10,000 investment to a $600 million exit. RXBar founder’s story is about as good as it gets when talking about bootstrapping entrepreneurs. Going from protein bars experiments in its kitchen, Peter Rahal has built one of the best success stories. He has sold RXBar for $600m to Kellog’s in 2017, just four years after its inception.
