The Foundation of Our Food and Drink Focus

3 min readOct 25, 2022

The first time we officially declared Food as a focus area was in the spring of 2018. “We see an impending tech-driven revolution in food, top to bottom,” we proclaimed. The never-ending hunt for new ingredients can indicate what people are likely to want, and deep bioscience can now indicate what people’s bodies really need. The ties between food, the gut biome, and mood are becoming better understood — an even further opportunity for detailed personalization.

Considering all of these factors, we decided to focus on:

Food products that derive from synthetic biology
Alternative, healthy food and beverage products based on real science that redefine markets in unsaturated areas of eating experience
Deep science diet-aligning products such as personalized probiotics
New ingredients and novel combinations of known ingredients that produce delightful products tied to innovative distribution and payment models
Alternative meats/sugars/proteins
Innovations in coffee, teas, and sauces
New, science-driven approaches to pet food and baby food

By May of 2019, we had invested in seven foodtech companies, all with great promise, particularly in these areas:

Lab-grown fish protein (Finless Foods)
Non-lab alternative proteins (Nicolas Morin-Forest I GOURMEY, Mushlabs, Meati, Planted )
Coffee and tea (Copper Cow Coffee, Wild Wonder, Weller).

In addition to our focus on water as a beverage, we also planned to actively explore deeper tech for water efficiency, capture, transformation to drinkability, and other long-term impacts. We also stated our intention to look specifically at DNA-based nutrition, which we weren’t sure food was ready for prime time — but we thought that optimizing food for particular genomes was a brilliant and promising idea in the realm of personalized food.

In 2020, our opinion stayed mainly the same, with two related additions: Next-gen Ingredients and now, officially, Water. Next-gen ingredients included lab-grown/plant-based fashion and beauty products. Lab-grown and plant clothing, particularly lab-grown leather, was making big strides in the manufacturing and supply chain side of fashion. Innovation in next-gen beauty products was also highly ingredient-based, incorporating collagen, plant proteins, pre- and pro- biotics, and custom vitamins, etc.

We determined that Water should be its own category, separate from beverage, because of its multiple uses besides ingestion. Water is life, and being able to deliver potable water where it is needed is critical for human survival. We started looking for systems that produce and deliver pure water in radical new ways, e.g., from the air or from new catalytic processes.

By that time, we had invested in a substantial amount of groundbreaking foodtech companies, including Yo-Kai Express, Orbillion Bio, Novel Farms, MyBacs, Blue Farm, and Bloom Science.

In our latest look into how we should refine our foci, both food and water emerged as of utmost importance. The effects of climate change are now necessitating urgent innovation in these areas. Firstly, food must be decoupled from land and sea. When the land burns, drowns, and swelters; when traditional weather patterns break, it becomes impossible to predict agricultural output and deliver food to a growing human population reliably. To feed future populations, food must come from some other source than soil-based agriculture and fishing-based seafood acquisition.

Of equal importance, it is essential to get pure water to individuals reliably and non-traditionally. As we previously declared, water is life, and being able to deliver potable water where it is needed is critical for human survival. Lakes, rivers, and wells cannot carry the load as a changing environment challenges them.

Our original statement stands: You can’t get more fundamental than food and drink. But now, it is increasingly important that the creation of the world’s food move away from total dependence on vast amounts of land and water. Our sourcing and creation of food and water must change, and we see enormous value from that shift.

By Marketing Director Nicole Staudinger

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The Foundation of Our Food and Drink Focus

Written by Joyance Partners

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