As the trend toward big businesses collaborating with start-ups continues to gain traction within the food-tech space, flavor powerhouse Givaudan has joined forces with Dutch food and agri-tech incubator StartLife to address global food challenges. Entrepreneurs often have no idea about the true business value of their technology and connecting them with corporates helps them seize their full potential and validate the business case, a representative at Startlife tells FoodIngredientsFirst, as it enters the collaboration.

“What makes Givaudan start-up-friendly is that they are able to quickly identify the relevant counterparts for our start-ups. We have experienced so far with Givaudan that they are very quick and open on providing start-ups with honest feedback,” explains Caroline Bijkerk, Global Partnerships Manager, StartLife, which is based on the campus of Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. “The sole objective of this partnership is to accelerate the market introductions of impactful technologies and helping start-ups to grow their business,” she adds. 

An example of a start-up that has been helped by Givaudan is an early stage business that has found a natural way of producing esters. “They learned from Givaudan the current prices being paid for synthetic alternatives which helped the start-up to build a viable business case,” says Bijkerk. 

Having evolved far beyond its roots, now considered the world’s largest company in offering taste solutions Givaudan partnering with StartLife is part of its 2020 strategy of collaborative innovation. It is the latest example of Givaudan’s efforts to develop real-world applications for disruptive ideas and breakthrough technologies to deliver superior and sustainable solutions for the food industry.

Speaking to FoodIngredientsFirst Fabio Campanile, Givaudan’s Head of Science & Technology, Flavours, details how the company is looking for entrepreneurs that are working on innovation and technology addressing the following areas:
• Enriching taste with natural and kitchen cupboard ingredients.
• Sustainable sourcing.
• Next-generation sugar, salt and fat reducing solutions.
• Natural functional ingredients (e.g. color, preservation).
• Novel ingredients for health, wellness and nutrition.
• Novel flavor delivery system technologies.
• Enabling alternative proteins.
• Consumer understanding, smart creation, transparent sourcing, and the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)/big data.

“Our partnership with StartLife is the latest example of how Givaudan’s market-leading knowledge and expertise for scalability is supporting the development of real-world applications for novel ideas and technologies,” Campanile says. “Together we are exploring new business models, disruptive ideas and novel technologies.”

StartLife will be Givaudan’s innovation and scouting partner and the organization will support  its aims to further expand its innovation ecosystem by acting as a connector and early start-up innovation enabler with Dutch-based food entrepreneurs.

The tie-up will allow the company to engage with emerging start-ups on the Wageningen campus, which is becoming a hot-spot of food science and food-tech activity in the Netherlands.

“There is a lot of innovation in the food business sparked by the opportunity to address emerging market needs. Start-ups are particularly fast at addressing them, hence our interest in collaborating with them,” Campanile explains.

“Ultimately, everything we do with start-ups and collaborators in this space is designed to create impact and added value for our customers, whether by developing new solutions or enhancing our existing solutions. This is an alternative approach to our established innovation pipeline and process,” she stresses. “We firmly believe start-ups can help us be more agile, diversify innovation, unlock unknown opportunities and even be more cost-effective in terms of innovation investment,” Campanile adds.

He explains how Givaudan’s innovation ecosystem is constantly evolving as new “hot spots” of activity emerge. The Netherlands and Wageningen in particular, are clearly an emerging place for food-tech, and this is wher Givaudan wants to build mutually beneficial collaborations, he says. 

“Our partnership with StartLife forms part of our wider commitment in addressing global food challenges through collaboration and innovation. We are engaging with top universities with strong research capabilities and with the ability to commercialize intellectual property,” he adds. “We offer them technological and scale up know-how and market access facilities which can only boost their chances of success.”

StartLife currently works with more than 300 start-up enterprises and describes itself as “the propeling force behind the food and agri-tech innovations required to meet global food demand in the future.”

Increasing focus on start-up incubators
Mutually beneficial collaborations are the order of the day as more and bigger players collaborate with start-ups to seek sustainable food and beverage solutions.

Nestlé launched its R&D Accelerator in Lausanne, Switzerland, in April which brings together scientists, students and start-ups to advance science and technology. The aim is to speed up the development of innovative products and for pioneers to tap into the systems and leverage the food and nutrition expertise of such a giant as Nestlé. In this way, the conglomerate hones in on taking entrepreneurial creativity and transforming it into tangible prototypes and products.

Meanwhile, Nestlé and Givaudan, alongside Bühler, are also co-founding the Future Food Initiative (FFI), designed to step up the search for sustainable, plastic-free packaging and to secure access to affordable nutrition as part of the global challenge of addressing hunger, malnutrition and sustainability.

Israel is also proving to be a “fertile ground” for agri-food innovation and the start-ups that drive it. Investments in the Israeli agri-food start-up sector have boomed from 2014 to 2018, raising almost US$800 million in funding over this period, according to a recent investing report from venture capital (VC) platform AgFunder.

Yesterday, Mars Incorporated and international venture capital (VC) fund Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) announced they were embarking on a “first-of-its-kind” research and development agreement in Israel. The pioneering partnership promises to spearhead disruptive solutions specific to the array of global challenges in the food system related to agri-tech, nutrition and food security.

And in China, the start-up accelerator and venture capital firm Bits x Bites has created a new model to foster cooperation between start-ups and corporations in collaboration with a multinational consortium of biotech firms, agricultural processors, flavor houses and consumer food companies. Coined the China Food Tech Hub, the platform was officially launched last month and has ten founding members.

By Gaynor Selby