Beyond the Pilot: How to build strong, scalable FoodTech businesses in Europe (and beyond)

A research-backed whitepaper for building FoodTech companies that survive real-world
constraints and scale.

Based on practitioner insights from investors, operators, and industry experts across the FoodTech ecosystem.
This report focuses on what actually drives adoption, scale, and economic viability in FoodTech.

What you’ll learn

• A framework to evaluate FoodTech viability
• Clear definitions of what “good” looks like at each stage
• Recurring failure patterns across companies
• Practical checklists for founders and investors
• Metrics that actually matter

Get the report

The seven themes

1. Unit economics as the primary filter: Profitability as a determinator whether a company scales at all.
2. Scale-up reality: Industrialization is the real bottleneck. Pilot success does not translate to industrial performance.
3. Ingredient-first innovation under supply pressure: Adoption is driven by supply constraints.
4. Enabled in an under-digitized industry: Software scales when it integrates. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t get adopted.
5. Go-to-Market under conservative buyers: The gap is organisational, operational and commercial.
6. Regulation as signal and accelerator: Regulation shapes timelines, capital needs and defensibility.
7. Capital discipline and the new viability profile: Capital must match risk. Misalignment destroys otherwise viable companies.

Credibility

FoodTech is undergoing a structural reset.
The constraint is execution credibility.
Buyers are more risk-sensitive.
Investors are more selective.
And the cost of being wrong has increased.
In this environment, adoption is driven by reliability, economics, and integration.

“Regulation accelerates when regulators take a collaborative approach… Startups misjudge timelines when they assume approvals transfer easily across jurisdictions. Regulation must be integrated early.” – Mathilde Do Chi, Forward Food Law

“If it doesn’t integrate seamlessly, it doesn’t scale.” – Abel Rossignol,Thia Ventures

“Many teams confuse pilot success with scalable demand and lab performance with factory performance. Food scales in stages.” – Ferry Kamp, Remagine Food (ex-Unilever)

Collaborators

Abel Rossignol (Thia Ventures) · Daniel Skavén Ruben (Good Grains / Solvable Syndicate) · Eshan Samaranayake (Better Bioeconomy) · Fabio Ziemssen (ZINTINUS) · Felix Leonhardt (Oyster Bay) · Ferry Kamp (Remagine Food, ex-Unilever) · Mathilde Do Chi (Food Law & Novel Food Advisor) · Nadine Geiser (World Fund) · Soledad Gurovic (Future Biome) · Steve Molino (Synthesis Capital) · Steve Simitzis (Replicator VC) · Tim Keller (Inventopia) · Marit Veenstra (HMT) · Adrian Friederich (Foodlabs)