José Luis Cabañero and the business of starting from scratch

José Luis Cabañero had already spent decades in technology when he decided to learn another craft. He went to culinary school. A career that included Cisco, Oracle, BBVA and Unisys acquired a cooking diploma, an unexpected companion to the familiar executive qualifications. By 2015, he was helping start Eatable Adventures. The name suggested an appetite for novelty. The work involved giving other people’s food businesses a firmer beginning.

The change had a concrete prompt. While living in San Francisco, he encountered a gastronomic incubator at an event and saw possibilities for a similar approach in Spain. He then devoted time to culinary training and learning the food business. It was a substantial preparation for a career turn, with the appealing complication that the student already knew quite a lot about building markets.

There is something pleasingly inconvenient about this route. An established technology career usually supplies enough acronyms to furnish a lifetime of conference badges. Cabañero added the vocabulary of cuisine, then began asking how food entrepreneurs might acquire the business support that technology founders had learned to expect.

A different sort of technical education

His formal education began with computer engineering at the University of Extremadura. Business training included the Stanford Executive Program and venture capital studies at Berkeley’s Haas School. His professional work covered new markets and emerging sectors across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Moving between unfamiliar commercial settings was already part of his working life.

The food qualifications took that habit somewhere tangible: a Diplôme de Cuisine at Le Cordon Bleu Madrid, based at Francisco de Vitoria University, and advanced gastronomy studies at Reims Champagne-Ardenne. That combination is useful context for his eventual company. He could approach food as a trained participant while bringing experience from another industry’s way of organizing and financing new businesses.

Culinary education also supplied relationships. In the company’s early days, Cabañero spoke about working with fellow alumni and former classmates who shared methods and expectations about quality. The classroom had become a place to find collaborators. A professional network, in this case, came with a rather better understanding of lunch than most.

The pastry business at the beginning

One early collaboration makes the origin less abstract. In June 2015, Eatable Adventures was working with Pink Cuisine, a pastry venture created by Le Cordon Bleu alumna Gabriela Steegman. Both took part in IN3, an entrepreneurship event organized by the US embassy around the opening of Google’s new entrepreneurship campus in Madrid.

Eatable Adventures designed the culinary entrepreneurship experience for the meal; Pink Cuisine supplied dessert. The division of labor is a small, useful glimpse of the company before the international programs and investment announcements. There was an event, a new business and an opportunity to put an entrepreneur’s work in front of people.

Cabañero co-founded Eatable Adventures with Mila Valcárcel and José de Isasa. The early proposition was rooted in gastronomic entrepreneurship: identify promising ideas and help their creators adapt them to a market. Consulting for established businesses sat alongside incubation and acceleration for new ones. Food could be creative, but the company forming around it still needed foundations.

The pastry collaboration captures something that can disappear in accounts of accelerators. Before an organization has a portfolio, it has particular people to help. A dessert at an entrepreneurship gathering is modest evidence of work getting done. It also makes a more memorable beginning than an organizational chart.

First, find the people

The next practical question was how to reach entrepreneurs early enough to be useful. Cabañero’s answer included Gastroemprendedores, a community offering encounters, information and examples from people already running food businesses. In a 2017 alumni interview, he described membership exceeding 3,000. The appetite for advice was becoming visible.

By 2019, he was describing quarterly events drawing about 200 people on average, alongside smaller gatherings every two weeks. His explanation was straightforward: support could begin when someone had an interest in entering the sector, even before there was a fully formed idea. Experienced entrepreneurs could explain the difficulties ahead while newcomers still had room to change course.

He wanted methods familiar in technology businesses applied to food ventures from their beginnings. The reasoning was cumulative. A small business that develops sound practices early has a better chance of becoming a competitive larger one. Food Business Angels added encounters with private investors for projects seeking finance. The community’s relationships acquired another practical use.

This is a less theatrical account of entrepreneurship than the solitary founder having a revelation. It contains meetings. It contains questions that someone else has asked before. It allows experience to circulate. For Cabañero, assembling those relationships became part of the business itself, rather than a social extra arranged after the serious work.

“We want to see more Spanish Food based businesses successfully grow outside our borders.”

José Luis Cabañero, 2017

The menu gets longer

The company’s scope widened beyond hospitality concepts. Its investment activity began to include technologies for growing, processing, packaging and tracing food. An entrepreneur in that setting might be developing an irrigation tool or an ingredient process rather than a new place to eat. Cabañero’s second career was moving further into the technical territory of his first.

In January 2024, Eatable Adventures announced a first closing for Europe Foodtech Acceleration Fund I SCSp, a vehicle with an announced size of €30 million. It also announced €6 million of initial investments across nine projects. These figures describe a fund and its initial activity, rather than the value of Cabañero’s business or his personal wealth.

Among those projects were Néboda, working on automated vertical growing; Soonapse, developing AI tools for irrigation; and Trusty, working on traceability. The names matter less than their variety. The investment proposition now reached into the processes behind a food product, including how crops use resources and how information follows goods through a supply chain.

Later in 2024, the company described a co-led €3.4 million funding round for Foreverland, which makes a carob-based alternative to cocoa. The announced purpose included establishing manufacturing and expanding in Europe. Here was a recognizably food-related idea with an industrial task attached: organize enough production to reach more customers.

In this phase, the work asks for more than an introduction to money. A new ingredient has to fit a buyer’s requirements. A growing system has to make sense to its operator. Putting technology inside food production creates obligations that persist after the presentation ends. The appetite for new ideas has to accommodate the details of making them usable.

Italy supplies the factory floor

Italy became a substantial part of that work through FoodSeed, operated with CDP Venture Capital. Eatable Adventures reports that the program has accelerated and invested in 21 startups, executed more than 50 industrial pilots and helped companies raise €10.2 million in follow-on funding. Together, the figures describe several stages between an early venture and its next commercial step.

A pilot gives the startup and a potential industrial partner something specific to examine together. Equipment, operating conditions and costs enter the conversation. For a founder, access to a manufacturer can reveal questions that remain hidden inside a laboratory or a small demonstration. For a manufacturer, the arrangement creates a way to examine unfamiliar technology.

There are institutional versions of the same problem. In work with Agrofood BIC, a group of five Italian food companies, Eatable Adventures helped organize international startup scouting and a framework for managing investments. Its case study reports more than 400 applications and two completed startup investments. Several established businesses were sharing the search for what might come next.

In July 2026, Cabañero discussed Italian food traditions and the technologies that might support their future. He pointed to applications including satellite information for agriculture and computer vision in farm machinery. His ambition included extending an innovation network beyond its northeastern base. The foods may carry regional identities; the work needed to keep producing them can involve expertise from elsewhere.

A second career with more than one border

Latin America also fits his earlier professional geography. In 2024, Eatable Adventures appointed Sergio Zúñiga Bohórquez to lead its regional work. The Colombian innovation hub brings together the company, the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce, Universidad de la Sabana, Alianza Team and Compensar. Organizing cooperation among institutions has become another setting for the work that began around entrepreneurs.

By May 2026, Cabañero was discussing early-stage deep-tech investing on the Investment Climate Podcast. The conversation included a new €50 million Fund II fundraising effort. That was a stated fundraising ambition. It offers a view of the next chapter he was seeking to build, with the outcome still dependent on raising and deploying capital.

The career remains unusual without requiring a mythology of inevitable success. Its documented ingredients are specific: technology employers, a return to study, culinary collaborators, a community and increasingly international investment work. The connecting interest is in what helps an unfamiliar idea become a workable business. Over time, the people involved have included chefs, scientists, manufacturers and investors.

His early aspiration for Spanish food businesses to grow abroad still provides a useful ending. Cabañero went back to school and emerged with a project larger than his own change of profession. He wanted other people’s enterprises to travel. The adventure in the name has acquired an itinerary, and many more people around the table.