Designing the Future of Food

Recent tech innovations make it possible to create lab-grown foods that are “bio-identical” to farm-raised foods at a lower cost. This has the $12T global food and grocery retail market primed for disruption in the next 10 to 15 years.

That’s the investment thesis of Sustainable Food Ventures (SFV), a Rolling Fund that’s raised $8M and counting since the start of Q420 to invest in “future of food” companies.

This includes companies that use a process called “precision fermentation” (PF) to create food grown from animal cells (“cultured” foods). Precision fermentation allows scientists to produce any complex organic molecule (proteins, fats, vitamins) to precise specifications in greater abundance than farm-raised molecules, because they don’t need to be extracted from macro-organisms (i.e. plants and animals).

PF is a threat to farm-raised foods because tech advancements have driven down the cost of precision biology. Cultured foods are expected to be 5x cheaper to produce than traditional animal proteins by 2030. This approach will be scaled through a “food-as-software” model, in which scientists upload molecular blueprints into databases that are accessible worldwide. By making molecular blueprints “open source,” food designers anywhere can replicate—and improve on—product designs.

Plant-based alternatives are already for farm-raised foods. Meanwhile, urbanization and climate change are reducing the supply of available agricultural land, leading to flattened output, higher production costs, and . In 2021, farm debt is expected to reach an . Meanwhile, plant-based production costs are reaching .