Other commodities will come and go, but food is guaranteed to always be in demand. As our population grows and life expectancy increases, our environment is becoming overstressed, creating a rising need for food innovation.
Consumers demand that the foods and beverages they consume change to meet their needs in taste, convenience and nutritional composition. Their busy lifestyles push them to seek flexible and accessible ways to get them, flocking to solutions that incorporate the latest technologies and distribution networks to solve the problems in a traditional segment.
The market is ripe for disruption through innovation and emerging solutions that reduce food waste, revolutionize the supply chain or reduce contamination through viable business models which may increase production yield, increase visibility with data analytics or automate with advanced robotics.
Food startups have a hunger for success that drives them to innovation. With the proper guidance and structure, they may be able to tackle the challenges that provide barriers to consumers, providing promising returns to investors who can understand their vision.
Food and agribusiness companies have traditionally yielded higher total returns to shareholders than many other industry sectors,* giving food startups lucrative investment potential. The difficulty lies in finding the right investment opportunity.
Our decades of experience give us the perspective to identify the most viable food-startup solutions. Each year, we evaluate hundreds of projects to find the entrepreneurs with the highest potential for success and connect them with the investors that can make the possibility become reality.
*Source: Pursuing the global opportunity in food and agribusiness, Mc Kinsey, 2015