Bread & Butter
Welcome to the first edition of Five Seasons Ventures' newsletter. Our mission is to back food tech entrepreneurs for a healthier, more sustainable and more efficient food system. In this newsletter, you'll find our latest news and publications, the events we plan to attend as well as food tech most important articles. Tasty reading 😋
We are excited to announce that we led Air Up’s €18m series A - read the full story here
Portfolio company Cortilia raises €34m in a series C - read the full story here
2020 has finally come to an end. It was a though year but what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Here’s how:
4 new food tech companies added to the portfolio bringing the total to 10 across Switzerland, France, Italy, UK and Germany. If you want to know more on why we invested in La Fourche, you can read it here
€160m+ of combined revenues in 2020 and 3x growth from 2019, as 👪 🐕 still eat 3 times a day
5 follow on up-rounds with more than €100m invested by prestigious VC and PE funds
582 FTEs employed by our portfolio companies with female accounting for 55% of the workforce
4 new investment professionals joined our team in Paris, now 7 strong and truly pan-European with 4 different nationalities and 6 languages. Aren’t they lovely ?
If you want to read more on why they chose to join Five Seasons Ventures, it’s here and here.
Thousands of boxes of food donated to medical staff, retirement homes and dog shelters throughout the year and our support to HopHopFood - a Paris-based NGO that helps families in need
Show me the money or how to raise funds when you're a food tech startup 🤑 - link
Are we biased data junkies ? - link
Covid-19 impact on food shopping behavior in Italy - link
Non-alcoholic spirits: is the mindful drinker the new flexitarian ? 🍹 - link
Niccolo Manzoni will be a speaker at the Food Tech Invest Days on Friday the 29th of January at 10:35am CET on the topic What’s the next big thing in Food - link to register here
Louis Magaldi Charles will be a jury in the monthly EIC ePitching with Investors on the 16th of February. We hope you could register in time!
Giancarlo Addario will be a panelist at the NCN Europe Investor Meeting on the 24th of February - link to apply here
As a new year begins, people like making predictions and food tech is no exception to this rule 🔮.
We selected for you the best food predictions we’ve read so far here from The Spoon and here from Agfunder. Green Queen wrote more specifically on the future of alternative proteins here and Grocery Dive about the future of groceries here.
As you may know, we are food tech investors with a particular focus on brands. Building a brand is hard, scaling it in the right direction is harder. Here is an article from The Sociology of Business on Brand Audit which summarizes the main questions related to business, brand, category, consumer and culture a brand has to ask itself in order to grow in the right direction.