Happy Women’s Entrepreneurship Day!
In honor of this special day we have gathered all the interviews Food Entrepreneurs had the pleasure of doing with powerful female leaders.
It is well-known that in almost any industry in the world women are underrepresented in the C-suite level and usually suffer from pay inequality as well as prejudice. If we take a look at the STEM field in general, women make up just 28% of it according to data from the National Science Board. Additionally, a 2019 report by AgFunder, Karen Karp & Partners, The New Food Economy and S2G Ventures shows that female startup founders face more pessimistic funding and smaller investments compared to male founders in the industry. Indeed, female-led companies represent a regrettable 7% of food-tech deals and 3% of dollars invested.
Although the sector as a whole is quite gloomy when it comes to women representation, let’s focus on a few of the successful and trailblazing startups with women in power.
Orbillion Bio
Orbillion Bio’s CEO and co-founder is Patricia Bubner. The startup is on a mission to bring healthy, sustainable and flavorful meats with a complete farm-to-table story to the modern consumer. The innovative startup is looking to develop premium cell-based meat products from heritage cell lines such as Wagyu, bison, and sheep that are low-fat, low-cholesterol and high-protein that are directly sourced from farmers.
Change Foods
Irina Gerry is the CMO at Change Foods, a precision fermentation food tech start-up, creating real dairy products, animal-free. They harness the power of microbes to create real dairy proteins, fats and flavors via precision fermentation. Then utilize traditional cheesemaking techniques to turn them into cheese that tastes, stretches, and melts just as you’d expect. No cows required!
Nourish Ingredients
The startup’s Chief Technical Officer is Anna El Tahchy. Nourish Ingredients is on a mission to revolutionize the taste experience of alternative proteins with animal-free fats and oils. The foodtech startup combines world-class scientists to make the plant changing impact by unlocking the potential of plant-based food products like plant-based burgers, plant-based steaks, plant-based dairy, etc.
Sundial Foods
This startup benefits from two female co-founders, Jessica Schwabach and Siwen Deng. Sundial Foods created a new production technology for whole cuts of plant-based meat. They develop plant-based meats, but what sets them apart is that they include the skin and bone in their chicken wings, elements that meat-eaters know and love.