February 24, 2017 | Beats

Food giants start to act like VCs to find healthy-food startups

The team at

ImpactAlpha

Recognizing the shift in consumer eating habits, food titans like General Mills and Kellogg are launching venture capital funds to invest in startups focused on healthier, less-processed food.

Last month, Kellogg’s Eighteen94 Capital invested $4.2 million in healthy snack producer Kuli Kuli (see “Taking an Impact Food Venture to the Crowd”). General Mills’ fund, 301 Inc., made a second, $6 million investment in kale chip maker, Rhythm Superfoods.

Last year, Campbell Soup and Tyson Foods set up in-house venture funds of $125 million and $150 million, respectively.

Photo credit: Charlotte / Flickr

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The team at

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March 24, 2023

The Brief

The Week’s Impact Briefing

🎧On this week’s podcast. Host Monique Aiken has the headlines and Atlas Impact Partners’ Robert Brown and ImpactAlpha contributing editor Imogen Rose-Smith join David Bank to parse how bank failures and interest rate hikes have changed the dynamics of impact investing – perhaps forever. “There were a lot of great ideas that were lousy businesses, which got funded over the last 10 years in an exceptionally accommodative interest rate environment,” Brown says. “That’s over.”

The Week’s Agent of Impact

Mindy Lubber, Ceres: Making the business case for responsible investing. Hundreds of companies and investors this week urged policymakers to protect their “freedom to invest responsibly,” marking a new level of mobilization to reclaim the narrative from an anti-ESG campaign that refuses to go away. A key orchestrator of the effort was Mindy Lubber, who has, for two decades at the helm of the nonprofit Ceres, worked the levers of power in corporate offices, investor boardrooms and on Capitol Hill in support of climate goals. She helped marshal business buy-in for the 2015 Paris climate accord and the more recent U.S. Inflation Reduction Act. This week, her organization is convening 500 business and government leaders in New York. “A freedom to invest,” she says, “is very definitely a core part of the American way.”

The Week’s Dealflow

Dealflow spotlight: Catalyzing capital for Africa’s water and sanitation infrastructure. Providing access to clean water and sanitation has long been a public-sector responsibility. But lower-income countries struggle to fund and implement critical water and sanitation infrastructure. More than two billion people worldwide still lack access to sanitation services; nearly a billion lack clean drinking water. This week, Belgium-based Incofin rolled out its Water Access Acceleration Fund with €36 million ($38.4 million) in blended financing from development finance institutions, banks, nonprofits and other organizations “to prove that the drinking water sector is investment-ready, even when targeting low-income people,” said Incofin’s Dina Pons. The fund includes a first-loss layer staked by USAID.

The Week’s Talent

James Andrus, ex- of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, joined Franklin Templeton in the new role of sustainability global markets vice president… Claudia Levan, former principal at General Atlantic, joined Lightspeed Venture Partners as fundraising vice president… Josepha Montana, ex- of Turenne Capital, joined Partech as chief sustainability officer, a new role.