Our mission is to shape the future of good food by investing in people
and technology to create more sustainable food systems.
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors;
we borrow it from our children.
Technology is the key to the future of good food.
Technology has always been a catalyst for our evolution and progress. As hunter gatherers, we crafted the spear. As farmers, we invented the plow. As industrialists, we transformed the food industry. We’ve introduced biotechnology into our seeds, production lines for packaged foods, and CPUs into our household appliances. Today, with the advent of digital technologies, what will be the food industry’s game changing invention?
This question comes at a critical juncture for sustainability concerns as the global population speeds towards 9 billion people by 2050. The food industry today already has an outsized impact on the environment because one-third of the world’s arable land is used for agriculture. How we advance base technologies or implement existing ones to feed the world is perhaps this generation’s most important responsibility.
People are the key to the future of good food.
In the story of good food, people are both hero and villain. We can be lazy, self-interested, and near-sighted; but we’re also quite capable of determination, love, and inspiration. It’s a matter of design in systems, products, and experiences that can shape our behavior and shift the impact of our decisions from negligent to good. The key to a good food future is to be sensitive to our innate capacity for empathy and to inspire the goodness in all of us.
If every purchase is an endorsement for the world we desire, then so far, we must not have been well-informed in our purchases. We believe that food education and scaling awareness is necessary for change. Knowledge, together with empathetic design, enables all of us to make better choices. The future of good food is in our hands.
The future can’t be predicted, but we can decide how we get there.
Food systems are complex – an intricate web of relationships in which cause and effect across the supply chain is difficult to fully understand. The risk lies in the unintended negative consequences of our good intentions. This happens when we react to a problem with an isolated rather than systematic approach. We know that there are no perfect solutions and that even the most considered solutions may have unpredictable outcomes. So our goal is to make no presumptions, to challenge every so-called fact, and to embrace complexity in order to understand it. We are skeptical optimists because we believe a rigorous approach is needed to create a future of good.
To create impact at scale, we must strike a sensible balance between purpose and profit. We are not an NGO (though we share many principles), nor are we a pure profit entity (though we deliver comparable investment returns). There is an interdependent relationship between purpose and profit such that a focus on one without the other fails to reach the objective of good. We uphold this principle for ourselves but also for the startups we invest in, because we believe a good food future of sustainable food systems is created through sustainable businesses.
Together we can tackle the fundamental challenges in all food systems: food access, food safety, food nutrition, and food awareness. These challenges are systematic in nature, and thereby the solution must be systematic in approach. Our investment target focuses on solving these challenges by investing across the supply chain, from agriculture, production, distribution and retail, to learning and sharing. We are more than a VC because we are vested as strategic partners with deep industry access and real resources across the supply chain to help our startups succeed.
China faces similar food system challenges as the rest of the world, only at a larger human scale with nearly 1.3 billion people. And with an estimated 600 million consumers reaching middle class in the next decade, the urgency is greater than ever before. We strive to do good at great scale, so it’s essential to address this market and its unique challenges. We want to invite the world to join us in our commitment to shaping the future of good food. #FoGF