It’s not just about turning vegan or reducing meat consumption. It’s about transforming the entire food system.
This is what we have learnt from Claire Smith, founder and Chief Investment Officer of Beyond Impact VC, a venture capital firm investing in vegan, plant-based and cruelty-free businesses. In this fireside chat, she talks about technology and scale as the only ways to make a significant impact on the well-being of animals and the environment.
Claire started to research the market for animal alternatives around 2015 as more people were turning vegan, reducing their meat consumption, and becoming increasingly aware of the negative impact of animal agriculture on the environment.
At the time, there were many old-style vegan products on the market that were not very attractive to most people and, she admits, not even very attractive to most vegans. She realised that those products and the small businesses behind them will not be able to make a big enough global impact.
“We want the products that we're investing in to be marketable across the globe and to be adopted by some of the large food manufacturing companies. So that those ingredients, those protein alternatives, go into the mainstream food,” Claire says.
