From the Farm to the Fork An interview with Co-founder of Forward Fooding: Alessio D'Antino
This week we spoke to Alessio D’Antino, co-founder of Forward Fooding, the world’s first collaborative platform for the food and beverage industry.
He told us about how Foodtech will become a fundamental source of innovation within our food system, through the collaboration between Corporations and Startups.
Our world is continuously affected by a series of factors including migration, natural disasters and pollution. Along with it, is our food system.
Hunger, malnutrition, climate change and maldistribution of resources, are only a few of the issues it is faced with today, according to the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations.
As challenges grow, and our system becomes more intricate, changes need to be made with regard to the processes that have governed the way food production and distribution has been carried out up to this day.
This is exactly what Forward Fooding has set out as its primary mission: to foster food innovation by enabling meaningful collaborations between corporates and startups.
Before founding Forward Fooding, Alessio’s experience in the food and beverage industry took place while working in a big food corporate.
He got the chance to experience first hand the dynamics underlying the industry, and realised it needed a radical change, starting from how the innovation agenda within the company was being managed.
Hence, Alessio founded CrowdFooding in 2014 when he was living in San Francisco with the aim of broadening access to capital for food entrepreneurs via a dedicated investment platform. The equity-crowdfunding model failed and since 2016, they have been helping the industry to work with startups.
In April 2018, the company was rebranded as ForwardFooding, the world’s first collaborative platform for the food and beverage industry, with the aim of ultimately raising the bar of food products for consumers, by helping the industry to redesign the food system surrounding us at present.
ForwardFooding was thus born as a proposition of resolving an issue in the industry that Alessio identifies as being two-sided: On the one hand, big corporations, which have the power to widely distribute their products, lack a certain dexterity, necessary for innovating their strategies and keeping up with customers’ necessities and trends. On the other, food and foodtech startups, which are gradually increasing within the European market, have a better chance at satisfying consumers’ needs in terms of novelty and transformation. However, often times they do not possess the infrastructure and tools they need to scale their business.
Forward Fooding’s main priority is to facilitate partnerships between these two different types of entities, combining the corporates’ expertise with the startups’ agility and ability of creating meaningful innovation for consumers.
“The only way this could be achieved, is by bridging the gap between the little ones and the big ones, allowing customers to gain access to more innovative (and often better quality) products from startup brands ”,
ForwardFooding has just partnered with Huckletree and launched the Food & Foodtech Innovation Hub, London’s first shared workspace dedicated to the most innovative food and tech startups.
This is the go-to place for like-minded food innovators to work together, enabling the fusion of food and technology, as well as the collaboration between corporates and startups. According to Alessio, foodtech has the power to disrupt and revolutionize the whole industry, by mainly bringing technological solutions to the issues of taking the food from the farm to the fork. Foodtech has a real opportunity in becoming a key player in London’s Tech City — it has the potential of mitigating the threats that our world and food system are fighting.
