Nina Meijers Of Foodbytes: How We Are Helping To Create A Resilient Food Supply Chain

An Interview With Martita Mestey

Embrace regenerative agriculture at scale: PepsiCo just invested $216m in helping their farmers transition to regenerative farming practices, which reduce production emissions and safeguard soil health. We need an avalanche of downstream investment and commitment in order to realize this transition at scale in a way that puts farmer livelihoods and environmental impact first.

The cascading logistical problems caused by the pandemic and the war in Eastern Europe have made securing a reliable supply chain a national imperative. What must agriculture companies and policymakers do to ensure secure and resilient food supply chains? In this interview series, we are talking to business leaders who can share insights from their experiences about how we can address these challenges. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Nina Meijers, Platform Director and North America Head, Foodbytes by Rabobank.

One of the original architects of Foodbytes, Rabobank’s long-standing innovation arm, Nina is now the platform director of its global online connection hub. Through her work at Foodbytes, Nina has built a strong network of startups, investors and corporates and has a nuanced understanding of the challenges and opportunities they face in actioning sustainable innovation. Prior to Foodbytes, Nina was the events, editorial and creative head at Food+Tech Connect.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?

Growing up in Burlington, Vermont, my family was focused on outdoor activities and travel. I grew up climbing trees with neighborhood friends, catching frogs in the pond up the hill, and then on to doing competitive gymnastics in middle school and water-skiing on Lake Champlain. Homemade meals were a cornerstone of our everyday life, and they often consisted of items that we grew in our backyard garden. I was also fortunate enough to do a lot of traveling at a young age — trips to Europe, Central and South America — experiences that really shaped my passion for food, culture and art.

It was an active upbringing that I wouldn’t change for anything!

You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Conviction: It’s important to be a leader that people want to follow. It’s invaluable to be able to clearly articulate the what, the how, and the why of your vision. I learned early in my career that conviction is most effective when it’s predicated by listening. When we had a massive model shift at Foodbytes this year, I took time with each of the North America team members to inquire about their challenges and concerns and helped them work through them. I then synthesized all of their input into our collective vision for the future of our product.

Care: It’s important to always be cheerleading for your team’s successes. Years ago, after a global team planning meeting, a colleague in our European team pulled me aside and said “you are clearly a champion for your teammates — the way you kept engaging that one shy, but eager, colleague and empowering them to share their ideas — that’s invaluable.” Years later, this has stuck with me.

Collaboration: Saying yes…but — or and — rather than no. Proposing creative solutions rather than reporting problems. Bringing people in, rather than blocking them out. It’s a classic rule of improv (Note: I studied theater in college and am a total theater nerd!). Even when it’s almost impossible and not what you really want to do, forcing yourself as a leader to take a beat, examine why you’re pushing back against something and decide in real time if saying ‘no’ and shutting the door on collaboration is truly necessary. Eight out of ten times it’s not, it’s ego or haste getting in the way. Saying ‘yes, and’ engenders a more collaborative, creative, and happy team.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

At the start of 2023, Foodbytes, Rabobank’s long-standing innovation arm, evolved into an online connection hub exclusively for the food and agriculture industry, where startups can garner exposure to potential partners, and corporates can discover the startups, trends and collaborators that can help them future proof their businesses.

Through this new iteration of Foodbytes, we aim to engage thousands of global startups and many hundreds of F&A corporates and investors. We believe that a seismic shift in food supply chain resilience will only happen through industry cross-collaboration. The Foodbytes hub is the place for those meaningful collaborations to take root.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. To ensure that we are all on the same page let’s begin with some simple definitions. What does the term “supply chain” encompass?

In its most simplistic form, it’s how food gets from farm to fork — encompassing the people, places and processes that play a role in that journey.

Can you help articulate the weaknesses in our current food supply chain systems?

There are many — and some hold more weight than others. Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of war have shined a light on challenges in the global food system. Including:

• A lack of transparency around how food gets from farm to plate;
• Ongoing labor challenges that are constraining production outputs;
• Waste and emissions generated throughout the supply chain;
• And continued reliance on monocrop agriculture and a lack of overall biodiversity.

Can you share with our readers a few of the things that your organization is doing to help create a more secure food supply chain?

As I mentioned above, Foodbytes is the place for startups, corporates and investors to connect for cross-collaboration. While playing this pivotal connector role, Foodbytes is helping to drive industry-wide innovation and adoption in an effort to drive real impact across a variety of sectors.

Over the last two years, Foodbytes alumni investment saw $2.41Bn, of that:

• AgTech startups saw $0.65B of investment.
• FoodTech startups saw $1.57B of investment.
• CPG startups saw $0.19B of investment.

Additionally, we’ve seen tangible results including strategic partnerships and direct investments. Barilla engaged multiple internal teams in Foodbytes and engaged with more than 10 startups in 2022, including selecting one for their internal accelerator, many in R&D testing and others in their partnership pipeline. On the investment side, NGN leveraged Foodbytes to get smart in the precision fermentation space, collaborating with both 2022 startups and other investor members, and investing in 2021 Foodbytes startup Paragon Pure.

What are a few threats over the horizon that might disrupt our food supply chain that we should take action now to correct? Can you please explain?

It goes without saying that future pandemics and instability through wars, of course, but most importantly the adverse effects of climate change on yields, grower livelihoods, food access and nutrition…just to name a few.

Ok, thank you. Here is the main question of our interview. What are the “5 Things We Must Do To Create Nationally Secure And Resilient Food Supply Chains” and why?

1. Reduce food waste: We waste 35% of the food we grow. That’s roughly $408 billion or 2% of U.S. GDP. Food security is intrinsically tied to waste and loss reduction, and data-driven solutions will play an increasingly meaningful role. Learn more about the important role Foodbytes partner ReFed is doing to move the needle here.
2. Reduce animal protein consumption: In recent years the UN Climate Change Report called for big changes to animal agriculture production and consumption to curb global warming, reduce growing strains on land and water and improve food security and human health. Imagine if as a nation we could get to 80/20 in terms of plant to animal product consumption. Our climate-impact would be drastically less and thus the resiliency of our supply chains much more robust.
3. Diversify crops for consumption: Only 12 crops make up 75 percent of calorie consumption globally, which largely go into processed foods. This is a major contributor to the challenge of obesity. We need to embrace biodiversity in the foods we grow, process and consume, to improve both human nutrition and soil health.
4. Embrace regenerative agriculture at scale: PepsiCo just invested $216m in helping their farmers transition to regenerative farming practices, which reduce production emissions and safeguard soil health. We need an avalanche of downstream investment and commitment in order to realize this transition at scale in a way that puts farmer livelihoods and environmental impact first.
5. Bolster regional food supply chains: In 2021, 83% of food manufacturers were embracing sourcing to more regional locations, up from 54% in 2020. In 2022, Misfits Market acquired Imperfect Foods to magnify the market power of their food waste-forward e-tail businesses. We need to continue that momentum. In order to create climate resilience in our food supply chains, we need to make regional food production sexy through innovation.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Let me preface this by emphatically noting I am not the first to highlight this issue — there are a number of amazing investors, journalists and entrepreneurs talking about this right now (Supply Change Capital, How Women Invest, Miyoko Schreiner, just to name a few).

Investment in women-only founded startups dropped to its lowest since 2016 at 2% Investment in minority women is even less than that. This is a deflating, yet galvanizing statistic. As a woman working in a male dominated financial institution, I see firsthand, and in aggregate, the effect that inherent biases have on whose ideas get funded. We need a paradigm shift from the top down. As mother of a two-year-old daughter, and a constant witness to the power, grit and resilience of women and mothers, I truly believe that if women in F&A received 50%+ of the startup funding available, we’d be on a rocketship to food supply chain resilience.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

For those that are interested in learning more about the work we do in F&A innovation at Foodbytes, visit www.foodbytesworld.com and sign-up for our monthly newsletter to stay in the know.

This was very inspiring and informative. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this interview!