Venture capital funding flooding the food and beverage industries in recent years has helped grease the wheels for many startups, but according to one investor a significant funding gap between pre-seed and subsequent early growth-stage rounds is holding back entrepreneurs in the space from reaching their full potential.

Starting or running a business is undeniably hard – for everyone. Even if someone appears to be strolling down easy street, chances are they still wake up panicked in the middle of the night, check their work email on their phones in the bathroom and stress over balancing budgets just like everyone else.

While online purchases of food and beverage currently account for only a small fraction of the categories’ total sales, consumers are embracing online grocery shopping at an exponential rate – making it a channel where industry players need to be for the long term success of their brands.

At IFT earlier this month, banana fosters flavor was everywhere – on popcorn, in cookies, even in coffee – but according to the ingredient company Virginia Dare its star power status at the show wasn’t just because it is a traditional dish of the conference’s host city of New Orleans.

When large food companies began cutting back on in-house R&D in favor of investing in startups’ with promising ideas, some either didn’t factor in or miscalculated the resources and time needed to scale-up their acquisitions before seeing returns – leaving them with a gap in their innovation pipelines and no easy way to fill it themselves.

As the line begins to blur between food and beverage, consumers are looking for more than just hydration from their drinks – they also want function, but according to market research firm Mintel figuring out which benefits resonate with which consumers in which category is a challenge that has many manufacturers stumped.

The CBD market is exploding with the ingredient popping up in everything from bars to beverages to confections and everything in between – driving up sales to more than $200 million in 2018 by conservative estimates and an expected $3.8 billion by 2025, according to market research.

Members of the Organic Trade Association converged in Washington, DC, last week to celebrate the segment’s continuous improvement, and to brainstorm with each other and legislators potential solutions to ongoing challenges facing the industry.

Despite what your parents told you growing up – looks matter – especially for food and beverage products in the current era of Instagram where more than 500 million people around the world check their photo feeds daily and 68% of Millennials photograph their food before eating it.

While the rapid growth of the plant-based market in the US initially may have been fueled by demand for alternatives to animal-protein and -dairy, the trend is quickly evolving as consumers’ tastes become more sophisticated and they begin to embrace plants for what they are – and not just what they can mimic and replace.