The Food Tech Playbook: What Actually Scales

Hello and welcome to New Wave, your go-to resource about climate investing in Europe. Joining me today are Nadine from WorldFound, a climate journalist VC investing from seed to service B. Gilles from Floer Ventures, a pre-seated to-series A-Found, investing in agri-food and sustainability. And Fabio from Zintilis, a gross capital food tech investor. And in this episode, we're laying out a playbook to invest in food tech at the different stages. Before we jump in, don't forget to take 2 seconds to subscribe on YouTube or to follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. This really helps us show. So thank you so much for us. I was looking at a few numbers before joining this podcast. By 2050, we'll see a 50% increase in food demand. From a climate perspective, food accounts for one set of global emissions, 70% of fresh water use and 40% of land use that didn't start with you. Why do you think so many people could have shy away from investing in food and ag? Yeah, maybe first of all, I think the numbers that you quoted are very right. And I think just one more fact that I'm going to throw in there, which I think people need to be aware of, actually 60% of our food only come from nine crops. If you look into 90% of our food, it's only 15 different crops, which is crazy if you think the whole world depends on 15 genetics, basically. And if one of them fails, we lack significant amounts of our food. But anyways, as we see the first and most important thing that we look into is returns, right? And so I think the easiest exercise that you can do is to look into the exit landscape for agriculture, to look into the exit landscape for food. And then you will quickly see that it's very much not like Google or Amazon, even though everyone is putting food in their mouth every single day, I think agriculture is extremely difficult. Because if you look into the exit landscape, mostly it's emanate transactions. And then there's very few exits that have been north of, let's say, around 500 million USD. There's some very few like Monsanto or maybe Syngenta was sold and a couple of years back that were like in a 40 billion range. But these were very mature companies at a very different stage in their lives, and it didn't have to do anything with venture financing. And so then if you look into those 500 million average exits and try to calculate back what that means in terms of valuations that we can come into and financing volumes that we can put in those companies and limits the equity story quite a bit of these companies. And so what happens in agriculture is typically that you have extremely low valuations, still have comparably high financing demands. And to top that off, it's very scientific because usually you need to, let's say, for example, you want to bring a new pesticide to the market. So what you need to do is you need to develop a chemical or a biological pesticide. You need to show first in the lab, then in the greenhouse, then in the field trial that this pesticide actually works, in that period which takes teens of years, you will not generate any revenues. And the investor landscape will have to look at the results of those individual trials and will try to assess if your pesticide will eventually is effective on the one hand side and safe on the other hand side. And if a regulator will be willing to approve it on top of everything else, so we also have the regulator with their fingers in the game. I think one important thing that you mentioned and this definitely counts for the food ecosystem is that it's so complex. It has so many different layers. I mean, on the cultural perspective, it's a different, they are culinary aspects. It's a different socio-demographic topics, etc. So there, even if you look at markets, it's so different. And then you look in the ecosystem as such that you have different channels, you have different players that play a role, different dynamics, and to really understand the food ecosystem, which is, I mean, it's one of the oldest systems we have in place, you really need to be, you really need to understand it. It's a bit different if we compare it, let's say, with some kind of deep tech markets or the internet, etc. It's a new development, you can really understand it, you know, the different business models that they are, etc. And you know exactly what you need to reach to get an access, to have critical markets, to have a really solutions that's better than the last one, etc. In the food ecosystem, it's totally different. Because, I mean, if you want to scale a company, you need to, you're so dependent from the retail landscape, from different food service players there. You need to look into different geographies. How do you want to address the value add of your products to different target groups? So it's such a complex system. And then on top, yeah, on top of everything, then comes also regulatory. So because, I mean, food is in our daily life. So it's also, it's one of the most important source that we have, besides air and water. So, and so, of course, their food security is also a very, very hard topic. And then you have, of course, also the, all the players that believe more in the old world, those are the ones that are believe in the new world. So I think, if you go with a classic VC perspective into this ecosystem, and you, you think of a classic, a whole hockey stick effect, and then you figure out, okay, that's, that's not going to happen after two, three, five years, yeah. Then of course, it is, not that attractive for you, because you really need to invest a lot of time, a lot of resources, to really build your network. You really have to find the right partners, et cetera. And this is something where I would say general or conventional investors have big challenges with that are more operating in different verticals. But us as food focused investors, yeah, with the network in place, et cetera, it's a different game, yeah. Fabio, you're specifically investing in food and ag and that is more for generalists to some extent with world fund. But come on, like, the picture we just painted is so bad, like, why would you do that? Like, if I may be, be challenging on that aspect, like, if, if we are painting such a bad picture, there's probably also like an upside somewhere, and a great opportunity. So, Jill Fabio tell me, where are the opportunities in food and ag? Let me just add one thing that I'm not misunderstood here. I'm not, I'm not saying that it's a bad market. I just say that access for investors that are not familiar with it, it's difficult. For us, I mean, it's a market I couldn't think of a more attractive market because I love the products. I love the business models. I love the people that are working here. It's for me a very, very attractive environment. And of course, if you have the right partners in place, you can already discuss potential exit routes with strategics, et cetera. So, it gives you, if you are in this ecosystem, and we all have a food company background. Sandin was also working for a big food player, and as well. So, we know exactly how the market works. And this is a different perspective. We were just explaining reasons why it's for external investors to feel difficult to enter into this market. Stepping back, I think there is, if you look at the industry as an industry, now combining food and ag a bit together and looking at the value chain, it's $8 trillion. It's the industry that employees the most people in the world in the value chain of food and agriculture. I think that several things that happened in the last few years, the Ukraine war, the Middle East crisis, actually showed a lot of the fragility of the supply chains and different crops. I mean, now we're seeing it with cocoa and coffee, of course, climate change. Obviously, and the last one is, there's a very nice study that McKinsey did a few years ago on the top five biggest industries, and their level of digitization, and as an ex-food industry guy that worked in large food companies, I can tell you that it leads digitized industry from the big ones. So, there's a lot of opportunity clearly, and it's a humongous industry, but that being said, there's a big gap between the opportunity in this industry to actually succeeding in it, especially in the venture playbook, actually, in the PE playbook. It's very clear, large companies know how to buy et cetera, and venture, it's a bit different because venture has specific characteristics, of time horizon, specific returns, et cetera. But that being said, with all of it, I think that, and that's where I think, you know, the difference comes a bit between generalists to specialize investors, and both are very important because we do need as much capital as possible in this industry. The last few years were, there was a lot of, until two, three years ago, there was a lot of excitement in food, which was on the other hand, great, but on the other way to look at it, brought a lot of money of people that just don't know the dynamics of the industry, and they had basically unrealistic expectations. So, food cannot work as sass, it cannot work as cyber, it has cat-packs, it has manufacturing, it has distribution, regulatory, all the things that were mentioned, that's one. The second point, which I think is probably the hardest point to comprehend, but actually, it's a simple one, food and agriculture, over the last 200 years, have really moved into a commodity business, right? I mean, we all moved from farmers around our houses, our great-grandparents were getting food, either they grew it or somebody around them, and today it's all about scale, huge manufacturers, long shelf life, etc. Now, that led to an industry that has very low price points, very low margins, very different than an attack industry. We cannot, the margin is really minuscule, and the price point is not one that you can play with too much. Now, a lot of the technologies we all bet on, and there's a lot of excitement, unfortunately, in the early stages, they're not at scale, and they are not very price competitive, and they are roading the margins of the players in the short term. And I think that's the play, now some of them overscale, and they are able to be competitive, some not. And I think that's part of what the industry expertise helps to understand. And I think there are a lot of excitement on topics that somebody that understands the industry would have known from the beginning that these would just never be competitive on its point. Maybe if I may jump in, yeah, really quickly, I think there's two more aspects to it, I think to summarize what Gil just said, I think the current food industry also is doing a lot of buying commodities and then selling them with their brands, which generates some sort of an attractive margin, still not comparable to the software industry for sure, but I think this is the current business model. And if you now come in with a biotech product with a new process, the input materials that you offer to these players is not a commodity, it's simply too expensive for them, so you really need to show some sort of a benefit that they would consider to bring it in their existing, let's say, talking about B2B ingredients, right, to bring it into their existing portfolio, there needs to be some functional component. And maybe one other aspect, why I think the last four years specifically, there was a lot of interest in the sector is I think we have seen two remarkable IPOs. One was the one of Beyond Meat and one was the one of Oatley at 10 billion and Oatley Beyond Meat at 1 billion, which what I think it showed both of them, I mean, eventually these companies couldn't really respond to the demand there, but what it shows is the investor interest and the consumer interest in these solutions. And I mean, for sure, we are now eating plant-based meat, or at least a certain fraction of the population is eating plant-based meats, and a certain fraction of the population is drinking their coffee with oat milk rather than conventional milk. So I think we have achieved something, but for me this is just a first wave to show that generalists have an interest in the sector. However, the companies that they will probably in the future consider investing in, they need to show that their margins are stable, their revenue growth is stable and stuff like that, and they cannot just be around because of an idea that is nice, and that sounds more sustainable. And I think from our perspective as world fund, why do we think it's attractive? I think because we, our perspective on this is we understand that climate change will have so much input impact, specifically on food production, which in cocoa we already see it painfully already, but it will go across many other crops in the future, that we think now is the right time to invest in the sector. However, what we also strongly believe in, there cannot be a price premium for a green product that actually needs to be, that the consumer, if they stand in front of the shelf, they basically have two reasons to choose a product, one is taste and one is price. So those two need to be met, otherwise you don't have a justification to be on the shelf in a retailer. I think it's a great point by Nadine, I think, and I take responsibility also as an industry guy. I think a lot of us in the last few years, although we knew this, we fell in love with a lot of cool things, and we forgot the basics. Price, taste, I mean, that's like, it's a mass, that's not negotiable. Maybe just to react to what you just said, I'm curious to you, Hill, the take from every one of you in the room right now, in term of, is food tech, a consumer play? What should you play in that value chain? Because obviously you have so much opportunities upstream in B2B, right? And then downstream in consumer, like you mentioned B on meat, and oddly, I'm a customer of them both, so I'm like a consumer, to that extent. But is that where we should play, or should you also play maybe upstream with the B2B guys, and that's where you can make money as a VC? They are definitely different approaches, and there's not one answer to it. We are also investor in Lavi, the company that's Lavi. Also in based in Paris. And I mean, if you look at Lavi and if you look at their brand play, yeah, it's unbelievable. I mean, they are really the one they were able to create a lot of brand in the French market, also in the UK market. And so this is something where I think it's, and for me, it was also part of my learning curve. I'm a marketer by heart, yeah, but to see really that a brand can be such a strong asset as something that I see in, for example, Lavi. I mean, if you have created such a brand, if you have a clear message with it, if you have not only customer, if you have fans, if you have people that love your brand, yeah, and follow you wherever you go, then you have really created a movement. And this is something that I see with, in this example, with Lavi, then this is a really, really good game. But this is something that you have to see. Then, of course, in the B2B world, there are also a lot of companies that are really moving the needle. Nadine was mentioning one in the car car business. I mean, this is the field where the economical opportunity and the ecological impact go really hand in hand. And this is something that's for us, as impact investors, one of the, it's, I would say, the gold nugget, yeah, if you're a, if it's such a strong demand in the market. And then if you, if you identify or can identify also a disrupting solution in the market that is accepted by all the conventional players, then this is, and this is something that we have here in the car car business, then it's, it's also a very, very good one. When we did, for example, the assessment there, we had a tons of calls, reference calls, with really old players, people that are working in the bakery industry for centuries, yeah. And if you hear from them that they are convinced about a solution and that they, they really want to invest in it, yeah, by, by updating their production lines, et cetera, then you, then you really see that you are on something. And this is, this is the, as I mentioned at the beginning, this is really the indicators that you can just have if you are in the market, and if you see that certain dynamics are taking place, yeah. But, yeah, this is, this is something where I see that the, the field can be a very, very attractive one. And Fabulous just maybe to react on what you just said, but as a growth stage investor that kind of you represent here in this call, what are the, I guess, companies are like verticals, we've seen food tech that are mature enough for you to invest in, because obviously it's probably completely different from what Nadine and Gila are doing, right? I think we have, especially when we talk about biotech companies and we were talking about this regulatory aspect, we have some challenges, especially in Europe, but we look at the growth investors that we really have a product market fit in place, so that we see year over year, on a sellout basis, a growth in a company. Sellout basis means really that the companies are not always selling in, but that they are also selling out, that the rotations are increasing, that it's not only growth based on POS increase and product line expansion, it's really growth on a product basis, and if you have this visibility in a product that fits to our, let's say, system sustainability KPIs, then this is what we are looking at, and then we are talking about companies that are north of 1 million in revenue and really dedicated in one specific market, not all over the place, attacking five markets at the same time, because the retail landscape from, let's say, the French market and the German market, they cannot be more different, because in Germany, you have a very decentralized system with the premium retailers in place, Reven Edeka, and then you have the discounters that they are so price sensitive, this is what Il was mentioning, so you really need to hit the nail on the head if you want to go in the German market, but it's of course also for plant-based players a very attractive one, because it's the biggest one in Europe, and then you have the French market, which is very centralized, you have the big players there, and so what we need to see is that they are dedicated retail strategies per country in place, and then I'm not talking about marketing, I'm just talking about sales, and then marketing comes on top, and the marketing play, especially when we're talking about B2C products, it's also a totally different one, and this is why I mentioned La Vie as a brand, because for my point of view, they really understood that as a challenger brand, you need to do unconventional marketing, and your brand is like an egg, you really need to take care of it, and you really need to build it, you need to have the right aesthetic plays, a play in place, and this is something that I really love about this brand. Yeah, maybe to counter that, I think the other side of the coin would be, you decide that you are a technology company, and you decide that you won't go into the brand, but then you basically need to, you have a range as an ingredient, where we call it actually the 1510 rule, which is about percentage inclusion rates in products, let's say you're 1% inclusion rate in a product, and probably the your ingredient is highly functional to the actual brand, and you will be maybe around texture of the product, or other key features, maybe also shelf life could be something like that, and that means that your product, you only need to produce it at low volumes, potentially high value for the actual brand, and that is kind of what I would say is an attractive positioning for an investor like ours, whereas when you look into the 10% inclusion rate, it rather means that you're some sort of a bulk ingredient potentially, and that the brand will be eventually extremely sensitive around how much of your product or of your ingredient will actually go into the final product, which means also that of course because 10% of the final weight of such a product is a lot, so you need to be able to produce at relatively large volumes, and potentially relatively low value, because there's such a sensitivity on the input prices, and so I think this is the other side of the coin is the contrasting thing, whereas Fabio talked more about how do you actually become a brand yourself, the alternative route for for companies in that sectors to go to market is really as a bit to be ingredient, but then you need to be somewhere in between, and I would say typically if I look at a company from an investor's perspective, like the 1% positioning is usually attractive specifically if you have a process that is extremely unconventional, and you have a lot of risk in the process, and you need to make sure you have enough margin for error quite literally to hit a sales point, a sales price point with your eventual customer that it's still attractive, so I think these are from my perspective in the food industry. These are the two positionings that you can have that would be attractive for a venture investor. I think that part of what I try to look at is systematic changes that can come outside of the industry also and can change the industry, so of course, to talk about coffee and cocoa prices last year went higher, I think, than Bitcoin right now, that's something that was not driven by the industry initially, it was by climate change, so I flew that there was et cetera, inefficiencies in Africa, et cetera. Another one at the moment is, which still we need to see how it unfolds is, for example, weight management in GLP1, today we have a situation that the food industry as an industry doesn't really have an interest to make people eat less. I mean, I come from the industry, they don't, doesn't matter what, it's not good for their business, but what's happening now, actually, the pharma industry developed an amazing solution that is reaping billions for the pharma industry, is making people eat less, and the food industry in a way needs to decide now, what are they doing? Are they sitting around and continuing to claim that doesn't impact them, which is not true, we do know that they done, we do see some companies and we're starting to get an impact, meaning the U.S. On the other hand, it also creates an opportunity if you're smart about this, right, because some people don't want to take pharmaceutical solutions, they're expensive, they have side effects, there's a big issue once you lost your weight, you actually, you go off the medication and you gain it back, so they're potentially placed for food ingredients or supplements, so there's a lot of opportunities there, and that's, for example, an opportunity space that, you know, I'm very bullish about or so, made a bet there, and I think it's going to create more opportunities. I'd love to dive a little bit deeper on food as medicine as a concept. I don't think it's a medicine, I think that's just a term that is called, so, for example, you know, I made a bet on a company called Lembas, it's a company that basically, what it does, it basically targets the same GLP-1 hormones that the medication does through peptides, it's for sure not going to have the same efficacy as a, it's not trying to compete with a pharma, there's no way for food and supplements to hands down, this is the end of the discussion ever to compete with pharma, it doesn't need to compete with pharma. The question is, can you be a complementary solution or can you be for people that don't want to take it? So, for example, Lembas is a B2B company, it's now engaging with some of the big supplement players and food players that are basically looking to integrate it in their products, so either as a supplement, they already supplement today that claim these things, the only problem that most of them don't work and they just kind of claim it, so this is really a company that is following, you know, clinical trials, human trials, etc. Or maybe even a more basic example, yeah, and maybe on the sugar alternative topic, I mean, why are we looking for sugar alternatives? I mean, I think most of you are familiar with Acysyl Pharma and Aspartum and all of those, but obviously, I think now the data are much more evident that these are actually intrinsically unhealthy and also not really hitting the functionality that sugar has. So sugar, amazingly, it's not just for taste and kind of doing stuff to our brain that makes us happy and releases endorphins, but it's also around functionality in the actual foods that it in and it doesn't matter if it's gummies or if it's confectionaries or if it's baking ingredients, sugar seems to have a lot of very advantages. So, for example, in gummies, that holds the water in baked good, for example, there's a biking ingredient and so it's extremely hard to cut out the sugar out of our confectionaries, but it would be extremely attractive because obviously this overeating is creating a huge burden on the healthcare systems and obesity is creating a huge burden on the healthcare systems. And so there's a widespread need for sugar alternatives, but the issue is that, either day, as we mentioned before, there's more the small molecules, which kind of like I'd say so the funds, but you know, newer versions of it that potentially have less have less impact on other health issues. So we know that there's some heart disease risk and some cancer risk associated with the consumption of these two, but obviously there is an opportunity for other small molecules to come in and bring the functionality and because it's still sugar derivatives or there's even protein ingredients that are highly sweet, less functional, but very, very sweet. A thousand times sweeter than conventional sugar would be, so we would rely on much less. And that's certainly something that is a huge investment opportunity in the market right now that is not really a medicine per se, but it will avoid people from becoming obese and eventually diabetic. I think it's a really good point, I think, in general that, you know, there's starting to be a movement, you know, there's a famous topic that shows up a lot today in the medical studies, you know, a doctor today, if you want to become a doctor, you usually in most universities around the world still today, you'll become a medical doctor having one course around nutrition. Now actually, if you think, now some people are obviously starting to push to change it, which should be changed, because actually, if you think about when we talk about food as medicine, what we're trying to say is actually the biggest way to impact human health and actually make, I mean, what does Pharma do? Pharma basically helps people when you're already sick. Let's try to cure you. But actually, if we don't want to become patients to start with and not actually get to the need to be cured, this is the theoretical conversation now, right? Nutrition, sports, you know, healthy lifestyle are probably the most important things you can do. Nutrition plays a huge, huge role here. And I think that's where you actually, by the way, also see sometimes there are some investors, I sit in a sugar reduction company on the board and the other investor with me on the board is actually a healthcare investor that never invested in food. And he invested because he basically says this and sugar reduction won't lead to obesity, so people won't need obesity, medication, et cetera. So the line sometimes blur between health and nutrition, it's a very interesting space. And maybe just to jump in here very quickly, but are we saying that basically we're not going to change people's habits? So basically, you're saying that in order to cut, for example, sugar, you just need to find an alternative of sugar that's less of a problem, but not to cut, for example, the consumption of candies, right? Like you're basically saying we need to change how it's made because people are not going to change their habits. Am I correct? I want my candy who go, what are you talking about? No, I think this is the same discussion that we had also in the alternative meat market. And so that it's all about convenience. In the end, you need to support the customer in changing his diet. And if you have to write ingredients in place and he can still have his indulgence by using eating candy, then of course, it's very convenient. He doesn't need to think about new recipes, et cetera. It's the same way that we had with the alternative meat brands. And then as a next step, you can think of new concepts, like tofu, zaitan, whatever, that has a new era then, but are saying to help customers. And here I'm talking more about the mass market. Then you need to give them guidance. You need to give them or tell they can really do it. There's one other thing when we were talking about food becomes medicine, an area that we looked into over the past months is the whole functional mushroom market. And I think it's also a very, very attractive one, because in the end, the traditional Chinese medicine is centuries old. And just to identify new ways and how to use it instead of classic supplements, it's also a very, very good way. And we see it with lines, with shaggy, with quality sets, all this different functional mushroom products. I mean, the demand is really increasing. It's coming. And here you are talking about new concepts that are also let's say used by retailers in their private label brands, also the innovators here in that market. When I see with Albert Hain, they are bringing health shots to the market with caught his lines main in it. And this is a very, very attractive sector. If you see that the functionality of beverages or of food becomes more and more important, not only for for customers, but for us as a society. Let's transition to another section. We have 15 minutes, which is very short to do that. But look, let's do the investment memo for investing in food tech. Okay, let's start with revenue. You all invested different stages. Fabio, you mentioned one million revenue is your minimum. Gil Nadine, what's yours? It's zero, basically, because you invest so early. Can be zero, yes. But Nadine, you also would do also with revenue. I mean, you also. We are across mighty stage investors, what we call it. And so from C to serious B. So we also like if you have revenues, which obviously makes it a bit easier. Yeah. And for us, we want million. And the one way is also not in stone. It's a starting point. Let's say like this. Yeah, which is which to be that seems small for a growth stage investor. Maybe that's specific to. But if you think of B2B companies, for example, it's a starting point. And then the scalability is a different one than talking about B2C companies. They would be definitely more. So yeah, but I need you to give you a number. And here you have one. Cool. Okay, well, thinking about the teams, what makes a great team? You mentioned something which is very interesting to me right now, which is this industry so complex that you need to have people that understand the industry. So do we need always in the team, someone that has industry experience in the food or eye industry? Is that a requirement? If you ask me, I think normally if I would look into pre-revenue companies and you have a very tech-driven focus there. And of course, a tech stack is very important. If you look in the later stage where commercialization is already key, then you need to have somebody in place who is very sales-oriented, very marketing-oriented, who knows the market. So this is, and I see a lot of companies that have really trouble to switch from a tech-centered company into commercial-centered companies. This is one of the big moves that are really important. Yeah, I would say in our stage, it's really important that there is somebody in place who knows the market, who knows the structures, definitely also the difference in the geographies. Try to look at, I mean, in a perfect situation, I would love a team that has somebody that has industry experience and actually somebody that comes from the outside because a lot of times folks from the outside have a good perspective on how to kind of disrupt things. There are situations that the whole team is from and not from the industry, and I think as an investor it's very important to find ways to complement them. Either as investors around the table that understand or bringing executives around them, or advisory board, etc. Here again and again, these stories, I just heard again, somebody was telling me yesterday about an ACTA company of folks that did something related to aquaculture, and they had the most amazing tech ever, but they never left the desk and the fluorescent and the lamps. And once they went the first time to the aquaculture farm, which was way too late, they figured out that everything they're doing is detached from reality. So I think you need to have some grounding in what's going on in the industry. These are not PowerPoint industries. PowerPoint is important, but you need to know what's going on in the ground. And maybe as a last point, I think again, I want to highlight the difference between a company that is more, I would say, more in the La Ville bucket where you have more focus on the brand. I mean, they also do tech development. I know that, but more focus on being a challenger brand and having a great go-to market strategy, various, if you have a B2B ingredient company, I think one big question on the team is always how big is your brand department, and how big is your basically marketing team? And I think in both, I think typically in a B2B ingredient company, it's a little bit underestimated the value of marketing and storytelling, but it should also be there, but probably the department is a big word for a startup, right? But probably the team there is a bit smaller than if you look into a company that really wants to build a challenger brand where this is much more strategic. And I think for me, the most difficult one, I like companies that plan to do it all by themselves, where you have a completely new product, new technology, let's say biotech product, that you want to bring to the market, you need to do detect development, you need to scale it up, you need to go to the regulator and then on top of that, you want to build your own brand, obviously all of these things cost money, but at the point where you actually enter the market, it also means that you need to completely pivot your team because before you had a team that was doing trying to find the optimal product, but at the point where you take the decision to go to market, your product development will still be there, but it will be much less than it was before. And then suddenly you need to start hiring those marketing people. So I think there's not a one size fits all here, but it's clear that you actually need to pivot from a team perspective and need to do a dramatic shift in kind of the overall percentages for the different departments on your team. And I think the best companies that I've seen have understood these challenges along the lives of a company and have managed them extremely well. Which is interesting because Nadine to your point is Lavi not the perfect counter example of what you just said. I mean, I don't know how techy the product is, but like they've built the entire tech plus the brand behind it or I'm wrong, like is my analysis wrong? This is very big tech step in the company, but the thing I said I mentioned is that they were also able to build really brand building. The whole company is very data driven. And this is what I like about them. Even if they look on every single sales channel, that's absolutely, they have a lot of data insights there. So this is what but makes a metric here, but yeah. So it's a counter example of someone that was able to do it all, no? Yeah, I think I think it's a good one, but I would still challenge you in that Fabio that I would say it's not a biotech process what they're using. And I think there is, don't get me wrong. I appreciate that there is and acknowledge that there is tech differentiation and what they do. However, the processes to the best of my knowledge, please correct me if I'm wrong, much more industry standard and have not been necessarily oil scaled up by them, but it's more like picking choosing from different industry and bringing this tech stack together, but it has already been operated at scale at attractive margins in other industries, which is a different thing from developing your own biotech process. It's just what I want to say. So it's quite again. I mean, obviously, if you talk about a pure ingredient company, then it's definitely a different game here. And I would actually add that I personally as an investor, I'm quite skeptical about companies that can succeed doing both, meaning being a company that develops breakthrough technology in science, let's say, more biotech driven and being an amazing consumer driven company goes until the end consumer with a brand. I don't know how that works because it requires completely two sets of founders and the P&L and the fundraising stack also has huge challenges because you need endless amount of money for the science and you would need endless amount of money for the marketing and distribution. And I've I know we all kind of there was a period that investors said that's the holy grail. I think it sounds like a holy grail on paper, but I've rarely seen anybody do that like really successfully. So I'm always skeptical when I see teams that send me a pitch, it says that they're going to do both of them because I just need to be really beyond Superman. And maybe maybe I can ask the two guys because obviously they're much more senior than I am. The question that I always have is in that context. I mean, I have an estimate of how much it will take to bring a biotech product to market and run through that time. But the question that I always have is what does it take to how much money does it take to build a brand that can really compete, let's say, on the chocolate shelf with the Mars, I mean, on the on the meat shelf with the with the local supplies, what is on the drink shelf with Coca-Cola? What do you need to invest and over which time period do you think it can happen? There's a very old saying of a German marketer in the 90s, he said, you need to have, and this was back then in the 90s, you need 50 million Deutschmark, which is around about 25 million euros nowadays or 50 million euros better say. But and it's not that wrong, but it always means in which market are you competing? And the other thing is do you need to communicate your brand or do you need your product concept? And this are also two different pair of shoes. If you have a different product and then one of one of my favorite examples is here, a baby food that is based in the freezer. So yeah, and this is something you need to market a completely new approach where the normal customer is not buying baby food. They are buying it in the drug store or they're buying it in the dry shelf assortment, but they never would go to a freezer or to the refrigerators area in the store to look for the product. And so that means that you need all to market the whole product concept. And so there are different layers to this question. But as I mentioned, it is really a lot of money that you normally need to go to good brand. But I think also Nadine, just from it's a great question from my days in Mondelis when we used to either invest or buy some of these companies. We always used to say that companies to reach the 10-15 million dollar revenue in the US, which is a huge market, is also super difficult. And it was that we used to view it as a proof of concept, meaning you show that you have a good product market fit and there's consumer pool. But there is the real jump from there to this kind of 50 plus or 100 million, which is that's where you are a real brand and not a small challenge of brand. Super difficult. Very few do it and takes years. I mean, that's what people forget. I mean, we always used to look at the slides of kind bars. It's an amazing snack bar in the US. Took 15 years to what we've seen today. You know, some of these, there are no stories of brand that within two years become. I mean, there is once in, I don't know, 10 years there's somebody that had, you know, but it just takes 10 years to create a big scalable brand and, you know, tens of hundreds of millions. Yeah. Isn't it? Yeah. And this is by the way, what I will recommend every we see, who enters into the food space. Don't go at this fancy venture startup conference. Go just to one of this big fairs. And then you really know what you are. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And this is, this is, I mean, the Anurga, they're over 8,000 extra bit does, yeah. It's the same goes for the CR, the same goes for the expo West. And then you know the market, then you know where you are. So it's right. You're right. And maybe to to wrap up this episode, but Nadine, do you want to give your estimates on how long it takes for biotech and how much money it takes for biotech to go to market? Because that's also the other side of the equation. Yeah. I always say that an answer that is not compared with current venture timelines, which is, I mean, realistically, 15 years, 100 million, at least, at least, but just as a rule of thumb, right? I mean, just also to end with an encouraging note on the VC landscape, maybe you can be faster. I don't think so, but maybe you can be faster, I mean, that's fun. But there's obviously always a secondary opportunity for you if the company is doing her. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. It was super insightful. I hope it's these serves as kind of a guide to navigate the fruit stake landscape. And I'll put the links to your LinkedIn profile. Is that the best way to reach out? If you don't want to reach out to your LinkedIn. Yeah, great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you.