Digital Success for Food Venture Matchday

In an entirely digital format, last week’s Ignite’s Food Venture matchday facilitated meetings to discuss a wide variety of solutions within smart agriculture, food production, sustainable consumption, packaging, digitalization and food waste reduction.

Eight corporations met with over 30 startups to explore how their potential collaborations could innovate the entire food chain. 

This matchday was organized in collaboration with RISE, and ran in a fully digital format.

Lill Andréasson, Program Manager at RISE had an opportunity to listen to some of the matchmaking sessions. “Many of the startups were really good at presenting their businesses according to their target group. It’s really impressive how far some meetings came in just 20 minutes.”

One of these startups was Bunny Bites, who have developed a nutritional vegan cheese. Founder Gabriella Berglund says she enjoyed the sessions and made some great contacts through her meetings. “As a small startup it can be tricky to know how to move on with your idea, and larger companies have usually gone through similar processes many times and have much better resources,” says Gabriella.

But these meetings aren’t only beneficial for the startups. According to Peter Andersson, Innovation Leader for Product Development at Solina Sweden, there are many benefits for his business too. “Startups often have the ability to discover the blanks in the shelves, and also have the time and energy to explore and develop these. If we are active and support these initiatives, we hope that we will learn from them, create a good network and in the long run we believe that our business will grow.” 

“It was a relaxed way to meet new people even though it was all digital. I can’t wait to actually meet some of the people in real life.”

Peter Anderson, Innovation Leader for Product Development at Solina Sweden

Magnus Noyan, Business Developer for Innovation at Systembolaget agrees saying that despite the limited meeting time, many great ideas were presented. 

“It was a very interesting and energizing experience and I hope some of the encounters will spark some sort of future collaboration. We met with 14 different companies, with more than 20 people from our side participating.”

The matchmaking provides a place for potential collaboration that is essential for both startups and corporates to remain competitive and sustainable in today’s market.

“We need to partner with startups/suppliers to invent new products. The Swedish food startup scene is growing and we see ourselves as an important part of the future food ecosystem, if we can give our insights to the system early, we believe the innovations will get even better. Some innovations on the Swedish market are really edgy which is great! We need more R&D into our food system, to be able to supply great products in a sustainable way in the future,” says Sara Maxence, Innovation Manager at ICA.

The Food Venture Matchmaking resulted in a total of 46 meetings and the participating companies were Alfa Laval, Herenco, IBM, ICA Sverige, Orkla, Paulig, Solina and Systembolaget. 

Startups:
Bioextrax, BrightAct, Bumbee Labs, Bunny Bites, C-Phrase Technologies Sweden, Creative Optimization, Edgy Veggie, Excellerise Solutions, FoodFacts Sweden, Foodloopz Sweden, Framvik Produktion, Glana Sensors, Hooked Seafood, HPViCo, Kairos Logic, Loop, loop-it, Lupinta, Mycorena, Nagoon, Nau, Norna, Parlametric, Picsmart, Prebona, SAVE VEGGY (SAVEGGY), Semsomi, Stockfiller, Tebrito, Textual, VXT Research