Eatable Adventures and Alianza Team create innovation portal to accelerate sustainable start-ups

22 Dec 2022 --- Columbian corporate group and lipid experts Alianza Team is creating an Open Innovation Portal to foster food industry start-ups, focusing on sustainability projects.

Through Alianza’s private equity fund Albora and with the support of Spanish start-up accelerator Eatable Adventures, the portal will offer start-ups access to tech facilities, logistic networks and possible investment plans.

FoodIngredientsFirst talks to Itziar Ortega, senior VP of global operations at Eatable Adventures, who explains the innovation platform’s ambitions and plans for Let’s Raise The Bar, a challenge for lipid and fat start-ups. 

Ortega underlines sustainability as one of the initiative’s foundations. 

“The Open Innovation Portal has been created to promote the collaboration between start-ups and the companies belonging to the Alianza Team to address the most relevant challenges of the lipids sector in terms of sustainability, cost efficiency, new consumer trends and improving the circularity of the food production chain,” she explains.

The collaboration marks a continued effort by Eatable to discover sustainable start-ups.

Betting on the future
Ortega places the initiative within the context of Eatable Adventures’ ambitions toward improving the present and future food systems.

“Eatable Adventures aims to build a more efficient and sustainable food system,” she says. 

“This initiative responds to this purpose and to the company’s strategy of betting on open innovation, promoting new collaboration models between industry and start-ups that allow applying innovation to the sector in a more agile and efficient way.”

Eatable understands the difficulties in forecasting the food-tech environment but hopes its accelerator projects will provide some degree of direction.

“The food-tech ecosystem is a fast-changing environment and it is difficult to foresee what technologies we will see applied among these challenges,” continues Ortega. “Surely, topics such as upcycling, optimization of resources or achieving a negative carbon footprint will be key to selecting the start-ups that will collaborate with the company.” 

Within this context of adaptation and anticipation, Ortega outlines that the portal will, as such, be looking for entrants with some degree of track record.

“The innovation portal aims to address the various challenges of the lipid industry to find new disruptive solutions that improve the efficiency and sustainability of the current production model and look for new opportunities in the market,” highlights Ortega. 

Although the company seeks a long-term impact on the industry with the innovation portal, the dynamics of collaboration with annual challenges” will be agile, seeking collaborations with start-ups that have already reached a certain maturity in the market,” according to the company.

The challenge will seek start-ups within the lipid sector.Raising the bar 
Ortega explains the Open Innovation Portal’s flagship Let’s Raise The Bar challenge, which plans to accelerate startups within the lipid sector.

“As Alianza Team is an expert in lipids and fats within the food sector, the relationship between the lipid industry and the soap industry is logical,” she outlines. 

“The Let’s Raise The Bar challenge aims to find the most disruptive start-ups in the soap industry, in all sectors, to obtain a sustainable raw material that offers a good quality product for its consumers and whose production is friendly to the planet.” 

It also offers a wide range of potential benefits for those running and those entering and acts as a framing system for Alianza to extend its lipid and fat specialization to a broader community. 

“With this challenge, Alianza Team could become a supplier of lipids for the development of upcoming projects or can collaborate in the design and manufacture of a given product,” says Ortaga.

“This also enhances the generation of new ideas, allowing cost optimization through access to technology and the opportunity for faster product scaling,” she adds.

“Also, the company could offer the development of the start-up’s product in a geographic area with an advantage over its competitors and take a stake in the start-up’s capital through the disbursement of a certain amount of financial resources or the total acquisition of the company.”

Building on successes
Eatable Adventures can already claim several successful start-up graduates from its accelerator programs. 

Ortega spotlights two.“Some of the most successful cases we’ve seen as an accelerator include Cocuus, a start-up that implements disruptive 3D bioprinting and robotics technologies to create plant or cell-based animal protein food analogs.”

“Another example would be Ekonoke. The start-up is a leader in the market of ingredients produced in Controlled Environment Agriculture. They cultivate beer hops using Vertical Indoor farming techniques to maximize quality and production, ensuring the ideal conditions for the optimal growth of plants.” 

By James Davies