​The Next Food System: Ingredients, Fermentation and Industrial Scale

​The food sector is shifting toward ingredient platforms and fermentation infrastructure as the foundation of the next generation of food products. The core challenge is not scientific — it is economic. Fermentation-derived ingredients and novel food inputs remain too expensive to displace incumbent systems at scale, and the cost curves are moving more slowly than early investment assumptions implied. But other industries — from renewable energy to industrial biotech — show that cost curves break not through incremental R&D alone, but through creative use of industrial side streams, shared infrastructure, and demand aggregation that no single company can engineer alone.

​This session brings together ingredient innovators, fermentation companies, food manufacturers, and investors to examine where the economics already work, what can be learned from sectors that have cracked analogous cost problems, and where the most productive interventions lie. Participants should expect a frank exchange grounded in operational reality — and a concrete view of what would actually move the needle.

​Cost is the acknowledged barrier. The more useful question is: where in the existing food and agriculture system — in its side streams, its infrastructure, its procurement scale — do the conditions already exist to make fermentation-derived ingredients economically viable? And what would it take to systematically exploit them?

​Meet your host

​Ali is a multi-stage food, agriculture and climate tech investor with an operational background. She is a Partner leading investments in Europe at the intersection of health and nature with Clay Capital.

​The discussion will be interactive by nature and led by the Nestlé, Beyond Impact, and Oatly.