Today’s programme completely exceeded our expectations. About 400 participants from the world’s most exciting food startups coming together in one space with the world’s most forward-thinking investors. This is how you change the global food system.

The world’s first New Food Invest has brought together a large number of high level investors with unique start-ups in key regions. We will see the fruits of this legendary matchmaking in the alternative protein sector in years to come.

Most dairy players are integrating into their growth strategy more and more plant-based options. After milk and yogurt, plant-based cheese is a huge growth avenue in the dairy alternative space. The future is very exciting on that side.

Not every solution needs to be a deeptech solution, I would encourage (entrepreneurs) to think about the myriad of pain points in our food system.

It will not go backwards, it will only scale, and the more people that jump into it and do it well, the better.

I am excited to see the power shift in our food system towards the consumers. It used to be that the food industry controlled and drove our choices. Now we see consumers drive the explosion in plant-based foods. It is a very exciting time to be part of this movement.

The financing is available and the rewards for both the entrepreneurs, and the investors, that will bring the next generation 2.0 solutions to market are really sizable.

Altogether (animal alternatives) forms an enormous total addressable market of, we estimate, 5 trillion US-dollars, or around a quarter of the size of the US economy.

We’re still in the first or second innings, if you look at household penetration, in vegan cheese only 2%, so a huge percentage of the population still don’t know that plant alternatives exist, I think we have another 10-15 years of really solid growth in this arena, before we are where plant-based milk is today.

What is surprising is how slow big companies join the movement. We need to get those elephants in the room to have a bigger impact.

We’re all excited by more activity in the space, in anything we are way below 1% of the total investment opportunity, there’s a lot more to come. Large multinational food and pharma are getting in, and it’s good for all of us.

If you give someone a hamburger from Beyond Meat and he or she likes it, that is a win and that is what we are trying to do for all products.

You could say there is a wall of capital (entering the space) at the moment, but we need investment to integrate vertically into our supply chain, and produce not only cheap products but healthy products.