An investor called Tsarona the next Oatly, the next Matcha. For most founders that's the dream. Kamogelo Thumankwe said no. Scaling fast that way meant betraying the mission the beverage brand was built on. Her business partner wasn't happy. A mentor told her to just do the milk and scale it. She turned it down anyway. With Kamogelo, co-founder of Tsarona, we talk through the real cost of choosing mission over fast money, why fitting in wasted her time, and what listening to actual customers taught her. In 7 min you learn how a mission-driven food founder decides when growth is worth it and when it isn't.Listen to the full conversation here.

Half of all Dutch citizens live with a chronic disease. Anke Kuik looked at that number, then looked at the supermarket, where more than 70% of the products are ultra processed, and asked the question nobody was acting on: if we know this is making us sick, why is it still the easy choice?

In this episode of Tomorrow's Bites, we sit down with Anke Kuik, co-founder of FLTRD, to unpack what it takes to build a food app that scores products on how processed they are, and to challenge the way we've all been taught to read food labels.

Anke didn't come from food. She built and sold a data and privacy company one year before GDPR went live, then combined that background in data and technology with a new obsession: why healthy choices are so hard to make. Her first version tried to do everything. Recipes, education, shopping lists, all outsourced to an external tech company, all too expensive to change. She stripped it down to one thing that actually worked.

The result is the Pure Score, a zero to 100 system validated by the University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam, built on more than 5,000 individually scored ingredients.

In this conversation, Anke reveals:

• The three mechanisms that actually make ultra processed food bad for you, and why "more than five ingredients" is the wrong way to think about it
• Why a fresh vegetable and a frozen one score exactly the same in her system
• How the same additive can score green in a tin of tomatoes and cost you points in a soft drink
• Why she won't give plus points for probiotics, even when the label brags about them
• What the Nutri-Score gets wrong, and why a red salmon score confuses everyone
• Why she's now licensing the score to the same supermarkets she started by scraping data from
• The uncomfortable trust problem waiting for her the day a supermarket becomes a partner
• Why 7,000 monthly users and a French app called Yuka convinced her the timing is finally right

This is a conversation about focus, food literacy, and the messy reality of turning a health mission into a business people will pay for.

If you build, brand, or sell anything people put in their mouths, this episode will change how you read the back of the packet.

Share it with someone who scans labels and still isn't sure what they're looking at.

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The Guest: Anke Kuik🌱

Look into the company: FLTRD

Oatly was oats mixed with water and oil. No patent. No breakthrough technology. It still took share from a dairy industry a hundred times its size. Caspar Krampe, food researcher at Wageningen University and co-founder of VGreens, explains why that happened. Big food companies rarely innovate. They defend, using standards and lobbying to keep smaller brands out. Startups have two ways through. One is co-evolution, trading knowledge for resources with an incumbent. The other is what Oatly did: start with a niche that has no alternative, then build the brand fast enough that the giants can't respond. With Caspar, we cover why this works in food and almost never works the way it does in tech. In 11 min you learn which of the two paths fits your food business.

Listen to the full episode ⁠here

What do you do when you realise at 19 years old that farming alone will never pay the bills and you have no business degree, no brand experience, and one crop to work with?

In this episode of Tomorrow's Bites, we sit down with Adam Palmer, regenerative farmer and founder of Littleseed, Charlie & Ivy's, and The Honest Bean Company a man who built over 100 products from a single farm on the hills of the Yorkshire Wolds, entirely through trial, error, and the fearlessness of not knowing what he didn't know.

Adam went fully regenerative in 2019, no pilot, no small trials, straight in. He stopped ploughing overnight, rebuilt his soil from scratch, and quietly became one of the last cold-press rapeseed oil producers standing in the UK after a market of 60 or 70 brands rose and collapsed around him. Along the way, he learned branding the hard way, watched a product fail because the label was dark blue, relaunched it and saw a 60% sales uplift without changing a single ingredient, and then turned a bucket of stolen fava beans from a neighbor's shed into a snack brand consumers genuinely love.

We explore:

• Why Adam went fully regenerative overnight — no trials, no safety net — and what happened to his soil, his yields, and his bills

• How farming taught him that soil is an asset, not a surface — and why most farmers around him still haven't made that shift

• The 66-bottle farmer's market moment that convinced him to build a food brand from scratch

  What a brand consultant standing in a Scottish farm shop aisle taught him about why good products fail

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW 

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😊 The Guest: Adam Palmer

Look into Honest beans

What if the real reason your retail partnerships aren't converting has nothing to do with your product and everything to do with how you think about the word "sales"?

In this episode of Building in public, we check back in with Andres Jara, founder of Favamole, for another building-in-public update, and this one goes deep on the thing that nobody in food business school teaches you: how to actually build relationships across an entire supply chain, without ever reducing people to the role they play in your revenue model.

From farmers to wholesalers to restaurant chefs, Andres has been learning — often the hard way — that every link in the food supply chain runs on the same currency: trust. And trust, it turns out, follows seasons, requires patience, and has almost nothing to do with a cold email.

We explore:

• Why the "valley of death" for food startups isn't about cash flow — it's about whether partners believe you'll still be there next year
• How Andres thinks about wholesalers not as logistics partners but as ecosystem players — and why that changes everything about how you show up in a meeting
• The dinner that changed how he thinks about stakeholder relationships: inviting chefs, farmers, investors, and caterers to celebrate the supply chain itself
• Why the word "cold" in cold outreach is the real problem — and how reframing it shifts the energy of every message you send
• How timing within natural seasons should dictate when you talk to farmers, restaurants, and retailers — and why ignoring that rhythm costs you relationships
• What's coming after summer: a new retailer listing, a product rebrand, and a flavor born from subtraction, not addition

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In this episode of Tomorrow's Bites, we sit down with Vincent Kuiper, founding partner of Gota Ventures, to build what might be the most honest roadmap for launching a food brand in 2026. Vincent has now covered over a dozen case studies of breakout CPG brands. Graza, Chomps, Upfront, Good Girl Snacks... What he found across all of them isn't what most founders expect to hear.

Vincent started investing at 16. His father gave him a brokerage account with 50 euros as a birthday present and said: just play with it. Fifteen years later, he co-founded an international angel syndicate of 55 investors from 15 countries, many of them former insiders at Cargill, Unilever, and major beverage companies, built specifically to open a food industry he calls a closed ecosystem.

What he learned from the inside is this: most food startups don't fail because the product is bad. They fail because they try to change how people behave.

In this conversation, Vincent breaks down the full journey from idea to shelf:

• Why the most overlooked categories in the supermarket are the most interesting ones to build in right now
• The one metric he checks before anything else when a food brand lands in his inbox
• Why he would not invest in an electrolyte brand today, and what that says about copycat risk across the whole CPG space
• How Chomps reached 900 million in revenue with two or three SKUs, and what most founders do instead
• The manufacturing decision that founders always get wrong in the first year
• When D2C is a testing lab and when it becomes a crutch
• Why retail velocity matters more than follower count when he's doing due diligence
• What he thinks about Upfront's move into supermarkets, and why he's watching it closely

This is a conversation about commercial reality, category timing, and the discipline it takes to build something that lasts beyond a trend cycle.

If you are building a food brand or thinking about it, this is the episode to listen to before you make your next move.

Share it with a founder who is about to scale before they are ready.

GOT SOMEONE IN MIND? ⁠TELL US⁠ WHO WE SHOULD BRING NEXT.

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW 

If you like our podcast please leave us a review on your favourite platform – even one sentence helps! Thank you for your support; it helps the show a lot and it helps others to discover the show! 

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😊 The Guest: Vincent Kuiper

Look into: Gota Ventures

Can a tiny farm out-earn a commodity grower?

Herb Young proves it can. His neighbors thought he'd gone crazy: an organic hippie with 1,350 citrus trees.

Then they saw his website: sold out, sold out, sold out.

Now those same conventional farmers are calling him for advice. Herb built Squeeze Citrus as a commercial brand from day one, with professional branding, direct-to-consumer marketing, and a story rooted in nutrient density and regenerative farming.

He found his customers in a health-conscious niche, not the supermarket next door. With Herb, we unpack how a food brand built on soil health and premium positioning can beat the commodity game.

In 12 min you learn how regenerative agriculture, smart branding, and a clear market can turn a small farm into a sold-out food business.

Listen to the full episode here

What if the missing ingredient in the food system isn't a better product, but a better way to build the people who build the products?

In this episode of Tomorrow's Bites, we sit down with Bart van der Zande, Director of Fresh Ventures, a venture studio on a mission to transform the food system by doing something that accelerators and VCs largely don't: building companies from scratch, before the idea even exists, with founders who are selected not just for their skills but for their relationship with a problem.

From 3,000 people reached to 300 applications to 25 carefully chosen founders per cohort, Fresh Ventures runs one of the most intentional company-building processes in the agri-food space. Bart has seen what separates the founders who break through from the ones who don’t, and it has very little to do with the technology they build.

We explore:

• Why venture studios are fundamentally different from accelerators and VCs and why the food system specifically needs all three

• How Fresh Ventures selects founders before the solution exists and why "problem-founder fit" matters more than the pitch

• Why deep domain experts are often the hardest people to get unstuck and how to coach them back to the problem they're actually best placed to solve

• The red flags Bart watches for in founders: fixed mindsets, burning relationships, and falling in love with a solution instead of a problem

• How the same venture building model is now being replicated in Uganda and Tanzania and why the approach has to be completely different And much more…
  

This is a conversation about what it actually takes to build companies that don't just grow but change the system they operate in.

GOT SOMEONE IN MIND? TELL US WHO WE SHOULD BRING NEXT.

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😊 The Guest: Bart van der Zande

Look into: Fresh ventures
 Venturing Into Regenerative Food Systems for everyone that do not know where to start.

How can you position yourself when you don't have a distribution network or the necessary industry connections?

Maybe everything you need to catch people attention is identity.

Curry Smugglers didn't knock on wholesaler doors, the wholesaler called them. Steve D. Sailopal built a brand distinctive enough that Selfridges stocked it, Fortnum & Mason gave them a full window display on Piccadilly, and buyers came looking. The product started in focus groups in Margate, and from there the brand took it to London's most iconic shops.

With Steve, we unpack how branding does the selling before your sales team exists. In 9 min you learn why standing out is the only distribution strategy that matters early on.

The farmer knows more about your food than anyone. But he doesn't own a single byte of data about it. Someone else does and they're not sharing the value back.

In this episode of Tomorrow's Bites, we sit down with Neil Smith, co-founder of Grow, to unpack one of the most counterintuitive arguments in food right now: that blockchain, the technology most people associate with crypto speculation, might be the most powerful tool farmers have ever been handed.

Neil didn't come from tech. He grew up farming in Canada, barely scratching two pennies together in bad years, watching a market system that rewarded yield over nutrition and stripped farmers of any real voice. His youngest sister has stage four cancer, brought on by what he describes as the failures of our food system. That's not theory for him. It's personal.

What he built with Grow isn't a crypto play. It's a ledger that nobody can manipulate, and the first blockchain built specifically around the utility of feeding people, not the speculation of trading tokens.

In this conversation, Neil reveals:

• Why farmers are the most data-rich people in the food chain, and the least compensated for it
• How Grow's first validation case was tracing regenerative food from a single farm to Amazon's Climate Pledge Arena, and why that changed everything
• Why the biggest obstacle to fixing the food system isn't consumer behavior, it's yield, and the entire economic model built around it
• How a convertible blockchain token creates real utility without ever needing to flip back to fiat currency
• Why it's older farmers, not younger ones, who are the first to adopt what Grow is building, and what that says about the future of the family farm
• The assumption that almost derailed the whole project: that change has to come from the ground up
• And why 20,000 community members in two years, 60% of them farmers, convinced him that the timing might finally be right

This is a conversation about trust, data sovereignty, and what it actually takes to build technology that serves the people growing our food, not the companies selling it.

If you work in food, agriculture, or impact investment and you've ever wondered whether blockchain is real or just noise, this episode will change how you think about it.

GOT SOMEONE IN MIND? ⁠TELL US⁠ WHO WE SHOULD BRING NEXT.

🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW 

If you like our podcast please leave us a review on your favourite platform – even one sentence helps! Thank you for your support; it helps the show a lot and it helps others to discover the show! 

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😊 The Guest: ⁠Neil Smith⁠

The company: Grow

The community: Grow Skool