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Watch how these 6 Taiwanese food tech startups disrupt the food market during Covid-19: Foodland Ventures Demo Day
Foodland Ventures, Taiwan's first food tech focused accelerator and venture capitalist, host their first demo day on July 22. The demo day has invited global VCs to join including Sequoia India, Scrum Ventures, and SOSV, and showcase 6 food tech startups.
Covid-19 pandemic makes the food eating scene have no choice but to transform. "Through applying the technology to the traditional food market, it is a great chance to level up the competitiveness for the food business in Taiwan," said Foodland Ventures.
The Agriculture & Food industry is one of the largest sectors around the globe. According to Foodland Ventures, the global market size for the agriculture and food industry is about to reach 6 trillion and 9 trillion. Furthermore, the global Food & Agriculture technology and products market was assessed to be 496 billion in 2021, and is determined to reach over 700 billion by 2026.
Before the pitch, Global VCs shared some pieces of advice for the food tech startups, and it can be summarized to be three points. First, there is huge market size for disrupting the food supply chain. Second, tear down the market potential for the delivery service. Third, what kinds of food services are needed in the Post-Covid world.
Sequoia Capital India vice president Rohit Agarwal mentioned that there are too many middlemen between the food chain. How to increase the efficiency of food chain would be a great topic for startups.
SOSV general partner William Bao Bean said that they are super interested in the disruption of animal protein. "Right now, animal protein is still 98% plus of the market, less than 2% is in alternative proteins, and we think there is a huge opportunity there," said William. "Some of the people on our team think that within 30 years, we won’t be eating animals anymore"
Food Tech Studio-Bites! director Ryo Hayashima share some pieces of advice for startups that want to go global. He emphasizes that the food companies need to adapt to local conditions. For example, coke, pizza, or fried chicken need different marketing strategies in different countries. "In order to go global, communication skills are most important, and this means not only the language side but also to understand the cultural gap is important," said Ryo.
The batch includes startups in the categories of cloud kitchen, restaurant automation, in-store restaurant tech, data-driven insight, smart supply chain, and fintech. The 6 startups are 3 SQUARE, 3T GDS Technology Inc, DOTDOT GLOBAL/ QuickClick, KABOB CREATIVE, Tsaitung Agriculture, and Yo-Kai Express.
Two startups we have covered: Yo-Kai Express and 3 SQUARE
Meet Global has covered Yo-Kai express and 3 SQUARE before.
Yo-Kai express seems like an ordinary vending machine, but there are lots of advanced technology inside.
Different from just putting frozen food into the microwave stove, Yo-Kai designed pre-processing methods for each meal on their menu, which means tuning the parameter of every food to make it best fit for heating. Furthermore, they developed a technology that can heat the temperature to 300 degrees Celcius within a few seconds. Combined with these two methods, customers can see Yo-Kai’s machine as a food factory that can deliver fresh food to you directly.
Until the end of 2020, Yo-Kai’s customers cover big tech companies such as Netflix, Tesla, and SoftBank. This list keeps growing, and students from the University of California San Francisco(UCSF), University of Arizona, City College of San Francisco, and National Taiwan University can also have flavorful Yo-Kai raman in early 2021.
3SQUARE is founded by food delivery expert Victor J. Chow, who is former COO of HonestBee and CEO of Foodpanda Taiwan.
3 SQUARE is a digital food hall which hosts several hand-picked dining brands, while offering a kitchen space that allows take-out orders to be filled. Digital food hall is taken from the concept of cloud kitchens. Cloud kitchens are cooking spaces made for delivery only, shared utilities and standardized food preparation lower costs for F&B (Food and Beverage) brands, while pushing for orders to grow.
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