Food investment – the next wave (the Tsunami)

A couple of years ago Björn Öste showed a healthy drink to the head nutritionist of the US state of Alabama. The nutritionist liked it, and said all their patients needed it and none of them could afford it. What those patients drank was sweetened iced tea, and some mothers gave it to their babies instead of breast milk. Björn, who built Oatly, co-hosted this food Ripple with Johan Jörgensen of Sweden Foodtech and told the story late in the session. The two predicted a wave of investment in food as medicine, driven by the cost of metabolic disease. The table accepted the cost. It was less sure the cure is something you can sell.

A bill for finance ministers

Björn began with the scale. Roughly 2 billion people are obese, at least 1 billion are pre-diabetic and around half a billion have type 2 diabetes, at a cost to society of about $7 trillion a year. Drug companies make big money from GLP-1 drugs, but drugs do not suit everyone and only fix what is already broken. The way forward is prevention. In Saudi Arabia, where 22% of the population has diabetes, the country is looking to food, not pills.

Johan added a larger number. About 250 million life-years are lost every year, and insurers value a life-year at around $100,000–150,000, so diets cost the world $25–40 trillion a year. That makes food a question for finance ministers and for employers. Staff with inflamed bodies decide less well, and a heavy lunch costs about an hour of productivity.

less techie and more eating real bloody food

Food as information

Johan, who has written a book on the subject, Flat Earth Food, said digital technology changed the world only when people changed their world view. Food needs the same shift. "Life is irreducibly complex," Johan said, and simplifying it has made people ill. Food is fuel, but it also carries information that instructs the immune system and the mind. Much of that information sits in secondary metabolites, which food labels do not measure. Better instruments, from AI to sensors, are only now revealing how complex this is, a change Johan compared to Copernicus. The winners will be companies that go deep into the science, not those selling fancy diets.

Björn warned that the hunt for a magic pill leaves people open to supplements that are mostly not clinically validated. Björn's own answer is meal order. Eating protein before carbohydrate improves blood-sugar control, but nobody wants to pick the meat out of a lasagne first. Before refrigeration, people ate a lot of fermented food, which is full of free amino acids. Björn's new company adds free amino acids to drinks taken before a meal, a way to get the effect without changing the plate.

Real bloody food

A corporate venture investor from the food industry questioned the premise. If everyone ate real food grown in healthy soils, the problem would not exist, so perhaps the answer is "less techie and more eating real bloody food". Getting rid of ultra-processed food would be a good start, and it could even be regulated as smoking is. One of the hosts wanted the same end but said habits change slowly, so healthy products must help people now.

Others wanted to put back what breeding and processing took out. A founder in precision breeding said money is flowing into bringing back ancestral and wild crops, with their older secondary-metabolite profiles and better climate resilience, though they would be premium products. An entrepreneur developing natural ingredients said nobody can undo the taste for sweetness that multinationals built, so start-ups must make indulgent, low-GI sweetness, along with new sources of prebiotic fibre for people who eat less fruit and vegetables than 50 years ago. Food, the entrepreneur said, will have to be more expensive.

Who pays for diversity

Cost kept coming back. One participant said everyone present was part of a privileged fraction of a per cent, and the solution had to reach people with access to only a narrow range of food. A food-systems advocate explained why diversity costs more. Most food sold now comes from five meats and twelve other foods, because narrowing the range brings economies of scale, and anything else cannot compete on price. Feeding all that livestock drives monocultures and EU soy imports, taking land from people in producing countries.

Big food offered no easy way out. One of the hosts cited a former UK health minister who had said that day that the food industry faces a reputational problem like the one Big Tech faces, and asked founders whether they want to be associated with it. One entrepreneur said incumbents are not a market in the short or mid term. They wait for start-ups to succeed and then buy, and one drinks giant took ten years and paid 100 times what it was first offered. A host was relaxed about that. Large food companies are good at production and distribution, and start-ups should feed them innovation.

The Hadza of western Tanzania, one of the hosts said, eat around 800 different things over a year and have a microbiome about three times as rich as ours. Most food sold today comes from 17. The host saw an opportunity for entrepreneurs in finding ways to measure what a food is worth beyond its calories. Until someone does, the 17 will keep winning on price.

This Ripple was hosted by Johan Jörgensen (Sweden Foodtech) and Björn Öste (Good Ideas) at The Drop 2026 on 16 September.