In our interview series, we quiz future food investors about the solutions that excite them the most, their favourite climate-forward restaurant, and what they look for in successful founders.
Steve Simitzis is a Partner at Solvable Syndicate.
What future food technologies most excite you?
Contrary to the doom and gloom, I’m most excited by cellular agriculture and cultivated meat. The crash in funding has, in my opinion, been a good thing for the space, as it’s refocusing founders on building real businesses with B2B customers in mind (meat producers, pet food manufacturers, etc.) without impossible valuations hanging over their heads.
Where I’m most interested is at pre-seed and seed level, where founders are inventing high-leverage technologies to reduce costs. Keep a close eye on the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture, which is building a new ecosystem around cell ag and, I expect, will have the next wave of breakout companies.
What are three future food verticals you are actively looking at for 2025?
- Enabling technologies for cellular agriculture and bioprocessing that reduce costs.
- Pet food! Always looking at pet food.
- Future food replacements for ingredients, especially pigments and dyes, that have broad applications across food, beauty, nutraceuticals, textiles, etc.
What do you consider the food tech sector’s greatest achievement in the past five years?
The achievement of plant-based milk reaching almost half of US households is something I could never have imagined in a million years. I went to a Starbucks in southeast Missouri and had my choice of soy milk, almond milk, and oat milk. Seriously, that’s incredible.
If you could wave a magic wand, how would you fix plant-based meat?
By getting costs down to cheaper than animal-based meat. We could be headed in that direction already: startups are engineering new ways to drive down costs (Rebellyous Foods is leading the way here), while from the other end, pandemics and supply shocks are raising costs for animal proteins. Once they meet in the middle, that’s the tipping point.
Sales growth of vegan egg alternatives during the egg crisis has me convinced that food inflation is the central villain in the story of plant-based. It’s a rational choice: why pay 5x for a plant-based alternative when your grocery bill is rising? You’re going to cut the most expensive products first. Let’s make tastier and healthier products where we can, but without fixing the cost of goods sold, only vegans are buying them.
The other force at work, unfortunately, is the rise of trad culture, which is leading people to dangerous choices like carnivore diets and raw milk. So if I can be granted a second magic wand, it would be for America to re-embrace modern civilisation.
What’s the top trait you look for in a founder?
I love founders who are obsessed with the problem they’ve set out to solve. When you’re problem-obsessed, you’ll want to keep digging deeper and deeper into your problem, and you’ll never give up until you solve it. I would say that tenacity and curiosity are the top founder traits that are downstream from being problem-obsessed.
I also look for founders who embrace work-life balance, even as they’re thinking about their startup 24/7. (Still problem-obsessed!) I don’t think anyone is more effective without good sleep, food, exercise, and time spent caring for the people and animals in your life. If I sense that a founder is neglecting those (and there’s always a tell), they are, to me, not investable.
The One That Got Away: What is the deal you wish you had gotten into, but didn’t?
A startup from our old incubator in Berkeley. I had the opportunity to invest, but public markets were tanking and I was hesitant to pull out cash.
What do you consider your most successful future food investment so far?
It’s still too early to claim winners, but I’m very excited about Omni Pet, who just received investment and exposure on Dragons’ Den UK, and has had exceptional growth over the last two years. Great product, great founders, what’s not to love?
What has been your most disappointing investment so far?
Back in 2000, I invested in a bottled tea company based in Santa Cruz that was right at the beginning of yerba mate as a new beverage category in the US. Product and timing were perfect, but the team fell apart due to co-founder infighting.
What do people misunderstand/get wrong most about VC?
Founders should deep dive into venture economics and how VC funds work (and where the capital comes from) to understand all of the incentives at play. Once you learn about the mechanics of venture funds, you start to see what kind of businesses aren’t a fit for venture capital, and more importantly, you’ll understand why.
What is the most ‘future food’ thing you have eaten this month?
I was lucky enough to try the Mission Barns meatballs and salami, made with cultivated fat, at its FDA approval party during Future Food-Tech week. It was delicious and tasted like a real meatball without that uncanny valley experience you sometimes get with alternatives.
Even though I’ve been vegan for decades, the food you eat in childhood still resonates with you and unlocks old memories when you taste it again, and the Mission Barns meatballs were 100% future nostalgia.
Where is your favourite climate-forward restaurant/dish/place to eat anywhere in the world?
I would consider moving to Zurich just to eat at Hiltl every night. It claims to be the oldest vegetarian restaurant in the world (since 1898, but who can say if Pythagoras wasn’t running a bistro on the side?).
The food at Hiltl is served buffet-style, so you never run out of new flavours to sample. I still think about their cremeschnitte, which was fully plant-based yet had the most delicate puffy pastry and custard. A triumph of a dessert.
What’s your ‘why’? What motivates you to do what you do?
I have been vegan for almost 30 years. I originally went vegan for the animals, in the OG days of brown soy milk and TVP (which, to be clear, I still eat and love).
Over time, I thought more and more about food system transformation, and the absurdity of using most of our land to raise cows. The wildfires here in the Bay Area that tore through forests around 2018-20 were deeply unsettling, and I wasn’t able to stop thinking about the destruction of habitats for the animals who lived in those forests. So, the fires cemented for me that this would become my life’s work.
At one point I considered going into climatetech (back when it was “clean tech”), but I connect with food more than power grids and heat pumps. Food is so fundamental, and everyone (and every culture) connects with it in a different way. We’ll never run out of problems to solve in food, which is what makes it such an endlessly interesting space to be in.
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