Food(Tech) Sovereignty in a Fractured World

On a recent trip to the Gulf, Alessio D'Antino of Forward Fooding saw countries pointing satellites out to sea to guard their desalination plants, the main source of their water. Alessio had thought satellites and missiles were for armies. In a fractured world, the inputs behind food need defending too. The Ripple Alessio hosted with Daniel Skaven Ruben of Business Sweden kept circling one question about that resilience, which was who pays for it. Nobody settled it.

Daniel gave the history in brief. After the Second World War, the modern food system was built to deliver cheap calories and bring hunger down from 50%, and it worked. It rested on cheap water, cheap energy and geopolitical stability, and none of those holds now. The hosts defined food sovereignty as the ability to keep access to inputs, knowledge, technology, production and distribution when trade, finance and geopolitics become unreliable.

Paying without noticing

A pre-seed investor wanted local networks that make essential goods and then grow through scale and capital. Asked who pays, the investor said nobody does if the economy works, because businesses grow into ecosystems and then into larger companies. They did not want to point at governments either. That is their money too.

Everyone is paying already, another participant said, just not at the till. Subsidies and other hidden costs have taken the price signal out of food, and on their estimate 70–80% of healthcare budgets can be traced to bad diets. Local systems may never be as cheap as shipping food across oceans, they said, but "we definitely have an insurance premium there that we currently don't pay." Near the end, one participant suggested a payer nobody had named. Government money is moving to defence, and food security should be part of it.

The most food-sovereign place on earth

A participant who works in cocoa turned the question around. In terms of power, they said, Europe is probably the most food-sovereign place on earth. The banks and companies that finance food and agriculture are based there, and even the American conglomerates that control raw-material flows buy them through teams in Amsterdam and Geneva. That sits badly with sovereignty as growing food at home. A power centre has to stay friendly to imports and to the processing hubs that create jobs.

France showed the bind. Farmers protest against cheap imports made under looser rules than their own, yet France is a major food manufacturer, and rules on imported inputs would hurt its exporters against countries such as Turkey. The participant had always supported the EU Deforestation Regulation and still thought it would do good, but expected it to push operations towards hubs such as Dubai. You cannot be sovereign by producing locally and sustainably and by controlling the trade at the same time, they said, and left that as an open question.

Another participant asked who gains when a food start-up succeeds. Most successful companies are bought by the incumbents, and it is not clear whether the value reaches farmers. They wanted that question asked in due diligence.

we definitely have an insurance premium there that we currently don't pay.

Money on the wrong clock

Alessio called the biggest challenge making food tech attractive to finance, because so much in it does not fit the timelines of pure tech VCs. A founder making palm oil without palm trees said there are very few successful companies. The first generation raised money when it was abundant, scaled loss-making processes and failed. Pharma has a playbook tying each round to set milestones. Food tech has none, and European regulation drags the scaling out.

The participant who had spoken of the unpaid premium was blunter. Forcing food tech into the VC model sets it up to fail from the start, they said, because ten-year funds need 10x exits and food will not deliver them. Alessio agreed about the timeframes but not the conclusion. Founders who need to scale still need private money, whether it comes from VCs or family offices, and 20 years to return it might ease the pressure. Alessio wanted to blend sources of capital, since the power law is hard to apply to agri-food tech.

The clearest answer to who pays came from a founder whose buyers already feel the shortage. The company makes protein from agri-food side streams by fermentation. For human food, anything other than baker's yeast faces a very long approval path, so the company was forced into animal nutrition and has come to love it. Pet food is growing faster than meat, and bird flu makes buyers hedge their raw materials. Peas are about 20% protein, the founder said, and turning the other 80% into protein could replace soy shipped from Brazil.

An investor said the shelves are already full of new products. They did not replace meat or milk, but they made a new category, and food culture takes a generation to change. Aldi uses plant-based meat in a hybrid product that nobody notices. It tastes the same, and its effect on the environment and supply chains is large. "Maybe it's not super sexy, but it makes money."

This Ripple was hosted by Alessio D'Antino (Forward Fooding) and Daniel Skaven Ruben (Business Sweden) at The Drop 2026 on 16 September.