Venture Studio Green Planet Foods Launches To Bring ‘Affordable Wellness’ To Mainland China

Green Planet Foods, a Singapore-based venture studio focused on plant-based food and advanced farming technologies, has just launched its venture studio. It will act as both a product innovator and an incubator that invests in solutions that will promote “affordable wellness” for the mainland Chinese market. 

On Monday (September 21), Green Planet Foods officially debuted its venture studio, which is focused on plant-based food innovation and new farming technologies. In a keynote address at the Future Food Asia 2020 conference, co-founder Ashok Vasudevan said that the mission of the new venture studio is to “promote affordable wellness in mainland China by blending global food innovation with scale, achieved through the acceleration and incubation of global innovations in plant-based food and beverage categories.”

With its extended network of corporate partners and investors, Green Planet Foods will be collaborating with global innovators to develop, localise and introduce products to the Chinese market. According to the company, several projects are already underway, including precision agriculture technology, new plant-based meat and dairy products and ready-made foods. 

Let us be clear – we are not an accelerator or incubator in the traditional sense of the word. We will actively share the risks and rewards with innovators, while bringing our inherent knowledge of the Chinese market. Where necessary, we will also lead the research and development of proprietary foods and technologies.

Klaus Anker Petersen, Co-Founder & CEO of Green Planet Foods

Explaining the work of the venture studio, co-founder and CEO Klaus Anker Petersen said: “Let us be clear – we are not an accelerator or incubator in the traditional sense of the word. We will actively share the risks and rewards with innovators, while bringing our inherent knowledge of the Chinese market. Where necessary, we will also lead the research and development of proprietary foods and technologies.” 

“We will offer an international yet local understanding of the Chinese market, while holding an industry-insider view towards technologies and the critical issues that need to be solved in the food value chain,” added co-founder Meera Vasudevan. “Combining the two, we will achieve tremendous momentum in the Chinese market.”

Interest in plant-based alternatives in China and other Asian markets has been steadily growing in recent years due to raised health, safety and supply concerns prompted by the ongoing African swine fever (ASF) outbreak, and further elevated by the current coronavirus pandemic and the resurgence livestock outbreaks such as avian flu and Div1 shrimp virus. 

China’s domestic plant-based meat and dairy market alone is predicted to attract more than 120 billion RMB (US$16.9 billion) in annual sales, with demand likely continuing to rise given the recent succession of milestone plant-based launches, perhaps most famously Beyond Meat, Omnipork and Oatly’s landmark partnership with Starbucks nationwide.

We will offer an international yet local understanding of the Chinese market, while holding an industry-insider view towards technologies and the critical issues that need to be solved in the food value chain. Combining the two, we will achieve tremendous momentum in the Chinese market.

Meera Vasudevan, Co-Founder of Green Planet Foods

“The recent Covid-19 situation has exposed how broken the world’s food systems are. Mainland China is at the cusp of a huge growth curve of its agriculture and food industry,” said co-founder Mark Qiu. “With its immense appetite for new innovations, the Chinese market offers unprecedented scale for new ideas and brands to set the trend for new categories of affordable wellness.”

Accounting for around 20% of the global population – representing a huge business opportunity – other projects like Green Planet Foods have been launched to focus on accelerating China’s plant-based innovation. 

Recently, Dao Foods, a cross-border impact sustainable protein investment venture, recently partnered with New Crop Capital to launch a new incubator project for Chinese plant-based startups followed by a Brinc and Lever VC’s launch of a new accelerator and investment fund for food techs across the country. 

Lead image courtesy of One Green Planet.