How should QSRs respond to the growing shift to plant-based alternatives?
Hear Temasek-backed Big Idea Ventures’ thoughts about it at the QSR Media Asia Conference & Awards.
Big Idea Ventures founder and managing partner Andrew Ive joins the QSR Media Asia Conference & Awards for special speaking session on plant-based investment themes and where it's headed.
A graduate from Harvard Business School, Ive also serves as an Advisory Board member for Tufts Nutrition Council, an advisor for Friedman School Entrepreneurship Advisor.
Big Idea Ventures’ investors include Tyson Foods, Temasek Holdings and Bühler Group.
Get a glimpse of Ive's thoughts by checking out the Q&A below:
QSR Media: From your perspective, how has the pandemic affected the industries you’re covering?
Ive: The food industry is one of the most vital, especially during times of national and international emergency so the demand for food increased during the pandemic, people realized aside from staying safe, and helping those in need, food was perhaps the next priority.
The increased demand for food caused considerable stresses on the supply chain, the equivalent to a run on the bank because of a collapse in confidence. Many brave people took considerable personal risks to ensure we continued to produce and ultimately deliver food to our people. Despite the initial fears, the food industry continued albeit with some considerable challenges solved by determined and committed workers.
At Big Idea Ventures, our investment strategy is to invest in the world's best early stage companies in the plant-based and cell-based categories. Thankfully, these early stage companies are incredibly entrepreneurial so when the pandemic hit, the companies quickly pivoted and took the necessary steps to adapt their business model to the challenges the pandemic created. In some cases that meant shifting their focus to focusing on new channels such as selling and delivering direct to the consumer.
What emerging trends are you seeing at this stage? How are businesses and consumers behaving?
Emerging trends include consumers increasingly adding plant-based foods to their diets. It's no longer the bastion of the vegan or the vegetarian in the dusty section of the store, now it's mainstream and anyone can stumble across a range of plant-based meat, seafood and dairy products in the main shopping aisles of most food stores around the world.
From Shanghai to Singapore, London to Lima, plant-based products can be found. The growth and innovation of plant-based products is phenomenal as alternative meat, seafood and dairy foods are tested, tasted and enjoyed in many homes across the world. This consumption shift is not going unnoticed by the global food companies or by the investment community as they all commit to creating better foods and answering the consumer demand for tasty, healthy and more environmentally sustainable plant-based meat, seafood and dairy products. This is not a trend, it's a revolution.
How do you imagine a post-COVID environment would look?
Consumers will demand safer, more sustainable but still delicious foods. Investors will follow where the consumers are shifting and will back the best and most innovative companies delivering on these consumer demands. Retailers will try to identify and bring in new foods the consumers are demanding or they will cease to be retailers.
The future will belong to global food companies who learn how to harness the fast moving creativity of the entrepreneur and the startup teams, bringing speed of innovation together with the global food company's own prowess in quality global sourcing, production and distribution. Those food companies who continue with their 1950's mode of 3-year product development cycles, traditional go-to-market channels and tired brand extensions will not see 2030. Consumers aren't looking for producers who extend, they're looking for producers who upend. For the first time, the consumer truly is right.
Just weeks remain before the QSR Media Asia Conference & Awards: A Virtual Event. Register now by clicking here.
