BackBone Ventures defining Mega Trends 2020
Miniseries #1: Which trend will come?
FoodTech: Food is known to be one of the largest markets in the world and therefore plays an essential role now and in the future. People are increasingly confronted with the scarcity of resources and it is definitely time to rethink; food, such as meat for example, must either be consumed more consciously or there will have to be alternatives to conventional production — ideally both.
In this respect we recognize a clear megatrend, which is already showing itself with various interesting and partly already very successful young companies; products that look, smell and taste like meat, but are based on plant-based ingredients, are gaining a lot of momentum like the swiss-based start-up planted. In addition, a few companies are already working on another fascinating alternative product — artificially produced meat, which is synthetically created by in vitro cell division. This results in meat with the same nutritional values as conventionally bred meat, whereby killing animals is no longer necessary. One of the first start-ups, like Memphis Meats or mosameat, that tackled this topic is part of our portfolio — namely the Israeli start-up SuperMeat. We at BackBone are convinced that this sector will play an important role in the future on a global scale and that this topic, as well as FoodTech in general deserves the title “mega trend”.
But not only the food itself will go through a change in the future, in relation to it we also claim the sub industry of packaging this food to go through a transition. By now the solutions for the large consumer market are more than limited. Although certain start-ups try to tackle this issue, like Sulapac or Paptic, a wholesale packaging solution is not yet invented for replacing the mass use of plastics. As the food packaging is one of the three main plastic-intensive industries, together with the construction and textile industry, we say; always leave one eye open for the game changing solution in this industry
