food-innovation
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The $30 Million Sandwich Roll That Taught Hero Bread How to Sell Bread
Hero Bread spent more than $30 million developing a very good roll for a very difficult customer. Its escape from the Subway trap became a sharper lesson: before asking a giant retailer to believe, find a thousand ordinary people who already do.
Hamburg Startups knows who you need to meet
A local newsroom became a club, a food-industry meeting place and a stage for women founders. Hamburg Startups has spent more than a decade turning attention into introductions - while learning what those introductions should cost.
Adrian Fuoco Makes the Spreadsheet Funny
Pizza Pizza's CMO has built a body of work around a deceptively practical idea: earn attention with a joke, then make the numbers carry it home.
Starday Built Four Food Brands to Sell the Food Industry Something It Lacks: Conviction
The Scottsdale startup spent four years turning hazelnut spread, chickpea crunch, seasoned rice and sweet-potato crackers into a live-fire test of its software. Now it is selling the decision system behind the snacks to the food companies that cannot afford another pretty dashboard.
Big Idea Ventures Wants to Turn Food Science Into Infrastructure
The New York investor does more than write checks. It links scientists, factories, corporations and rural universities in a bid to move food technology from the lab to the loading dock.
Ian Pinner Has Spent 26 Years Learning How Food Moves
Seventeen roles, every region, one company. Ian Pinner's route from wheat trading to ADM's nutrition business shows what happens when a career is built by learning the whole system.
Jennifer Bentz
Jennifer Bentz spent three decades learning how shoppers reveal what they want. Now Utz Brands’ chief marketing officer is turning that habit of attention into a playbook for a century-old snack company: sharpen the portfolio, test early, and let evidence earn the next bet.
Thomas Bowman
Thomas Bowman is a James Beard-nominated chef turned food scientist and the co-founder of Eclipse Foods, an Alameda, California company building molecule-for-molecule plant-based replacements for dairy. After cooking and staging at restaurants that together held 16 Michelin stars and leading product development at JUST (formerly Hampton Creek), Bowman set out to recreate the taste and texture of dairy from non-GMO plants like oats, corn, and potatoes. Eclipse launched in 2019 out of Y Combinator, chose ice cream as its flagship, and has raised roughly $96 million to date, reaching retailers, foodservice, and direct-to-consumer channels.
Marty Kolewe
Marty Kolewe is a chemical engineer turned food-tech founder and the CEO of Foodberry, a Boston company that reverse-engineers fruit skin to make edible, plant-based coatings that keep fresh food fresh without plastic. Trained at Johns Hopkins, UMass Amherst, and MIT's Langer Lab, he traded a career in drug delivery for one in snacks, betting that the science behind a peach's peel could reshape how the world packages and eats food. Under his leadership Foodberry has amassed 20-plus patents, closed a $15 million Series A, and lined up partners from a dairy-free ice-cream maker to the global owner of Babybel.
Foodberry
Foodberry is a Boston food-technology company that reverse-engineers the way nature wraps fruit. Its proprietary plant-based coatings turn purees, nut butters, dairy, and even ice cream into self-contained, mess-free, bite-sized snacks - no plastic wrapper required. Spun out of Harvard and MIT lab research and backed by 20-plus issued patents, Foodberry works as a B2B innovation and co-manufacturing partner to consumer brands, with a recent strategic partnership with Bel Group (Babybel, GoGo squeeZ) aimed at the $6B+ U.S. fruit-snack category.
Ryan Pandya
Ryan Pandya co-founded Perfect Day in 2014 with the audacious goal of making dairy without cows. Using precision fermentation, the Berkeley-based biotech raised nearly $800 million, built partnerships with Fortune 500 food companies, and proved that animal-free whey protein could reach global markets across dozens of product categories. After a decade at the helm, Pandya stepped down as CEO at the end of 2023 to pursue future ventures, leaving behind a company that had fundamentally shifted the conversation around sustainable dairy.
Justin Kolbeck
Justin Kolbeck is Co-Founder and CEO of Wildtype, the San Francisco-based cultivated seafood company that became the first to receive FDA regulatory clearance for cell-grown salmon in the United States. A former U.S. Foreign Service Officer who served in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Kolbeck channeled his firsthand experience with global food insecurity into co-founding Wildtype in 2016 alongside cardiologist and microbiologist Aryé Elfenbein. The company has raised over $123 million in funding - including a record $100 million Series B backed by Leonardo DiCaprio, Jeff Bezos, and Robert Downey Jr. - and launched its sushi-grade coho salmon at award-winning restaurants in 2025. Wildtype's salmon, grown in stainless steel bioreactors in a converted San Francisco brewery, was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2025.
Savor
Savor is a San Jose food-tech company making real fats - butter, oils, cocoa-butter analogues - from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen instead of cows, palms or coconuts. Backed by Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, it commercialised its first carbon-derived butter in 2025.
Wildtype
Wildtype is a San Francisco-based cultivated seafood company that grows real salmon from fish cells in stainless steel bioreactors - no fishing, no farming, no ocean required. Founded in 2016 by a cardiologist-turned-food-scientist and a former U.S. Foreign Service officer, the company received FDA clearance in May 2025, making it the first cultivated seafood product approved for sale in the United States. With $123.5M raised and backing from Jeff Bezos, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Cargill, Wildtype is betting that the future of seafood is grown, not caught.
Arturo Elizondo
Arturo Elizondo is the co-founder and CEO of The EVERY Company (formerly Clara Foods), the precision fermentation biotech pioneering animal-free egg proteins used by food brands worldwide. Born in Laredo, Texas, educated at Harvard, and seasoned by stints at the White House, USDA, and Credit Suisse, he co-founded the company in 2014 after meeting a cell biologist at a food-tech conference. Under his leadership, EVERY has raised over $471M, launched the world's first animal-free egg protein into Walmart, attracted actress Anne Hathaway as an investor, and earned Elizondo the EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2023 Bay Area Award. His mission: end factory farming by making fermentation-derived proteins cheaper, cleaner, and better than the real thing.
Josh Tetrick
Josh Tetrick is the co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, Inc., the San Francisco-based food technology company behind JUST Egg (a mung bean-based egg substitute) and GOOD Meat (the world's first commercially sold cultivated chicken). Starting with $37,000 of personal capital in 2011, he has raised over $456 million to build a company that simultaneously cracked the plant-based egg market and won the world's first regulatory approval for lab-grown meat in Singapore in 2020. A former Fulbright Scholar, UN initiative leader, and Cornell-educated lawyer turned food disruptor, Tetrick has made it his life's work to prove that removing animals from the food system doesn't mean sacrificing flavor or scale.
Kathleen Alexander
Kathleen Alexander is co-founder and CEO of Savor, a San Jose-based food-tech startup that makes butter, palm oil, and cocoa butter alternatives from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen - no animals, no plants, no farmland. Backed by Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Synthesis Capital with $33 million raised, Savor commercially launched its carbon-synthesized butter in March 2025 and was recognized in TIME's Best Inventions of 2025. Alexander holds a PhD in Materials Science & Engineering from MIT and is a 2013 Hertz Fellow who grew up in Corvallis, Oregon - famously starting college at 16, dropping out, attending community college, and ultimately earning her doctorate at MIT.