Tomorrow's Bites with Andrés and Sjacco

Andrés and Sjacco

Food is a problem and this podcast is full of solutions. The food entrepreneurs fixing it are building the most interesting companies in the world. Tomorrow's Bites, hosted by Andrés and Sjacco, gets inside the playbooks of the founders, farmers, investors and operators scaling food businesses that actually matter, and shaping what ends up on tomorrow's plate. If you're building a food startup, working in the food industry, or just hungry to learn from the people reshaping it, this podcast is for you.

  1. Inside the Venture Studio Turning 300 Applicants Into Food System Changers - With Bart van der Zande Director Fresh Ventures Studio

    4 days ago

    Inside the Venture Studio Turning 300 Applicants Into Food System Changers - With Bart van der Zande Director Fresh Ventures Studio

    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. 🙏 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!  👋 GET IN TOUCH WITH US 👥 ⁠Linkedin⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 🌎 ⁠⁠Website⁠ 😊 The Guest: Bart van der Zande Look into: Fresh ventures Venturing Into Regenerative Food Systems for everyone that do not know where to start.

    1hr 12min

  2. 17 Jun

    The Part Listeners Didn't Skip: How Food Startups Can Leverage Their Branding To Get Listed in Wholesalers - with Steve D. Sailopal, co-founder of Curry Smugglers

    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.

    9 min
  3. Why Blockchain Is Going To Change Agriculture and Food Businesses Forever - with Neil Smith, Co-Founder of Grow

    10 Jun

    Why Blockchain Is Going To Change Agriculture and Food Businesses Forever - with Neil Smith, Co-Founder of Grow

    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 itHow Grow's first validation case was tracing regenerative food from a single farm to Amazon's Climate Pledge Arena, and why that changed everythingWhy the biggest obstacle to fixing the food system isn't consumer behavior, it's yield, and the entire economic model built around itHow a convertible blockchain token creates real utility without ever needing to flip back to fiat currencyWhy 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 farmThe assumption that almost derailed the whole project: that change has to come from the ground upAnd why 20,000 community members in two years, 60% of them farmers, convinced him that the timing might finally be rightThis 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!  👋 GET IN TOUCH WITH US 👥 ⁠Linkedin⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠🌎 Website⁠ 😊 The Guest: ⁠Neil Smith⁠ The company: Grow The community: Grow Skool

    55 min
  4. Building in Public #8: How To Secure Funding As A Food Startup In Your First Year - With Andres Jara Co-Founder Of Favamole

    3 Jun

    Building in Public #8: How To Secure Funding As A Food Startup In Your First Year - With Andres Jara Co-Founder Of Favamole

    Most food startups run out of money before they run out of ideas. The ones that don't share one thing in common: they started planting before they were hungry. In this Build in Public episode of Tomorrow's Bites, Andres Jara is back with a month that took him from securing funding in the Netherlands to speaking on stage at a regenerative agriculture summit in Colombia, and seeing his father for the first time in seventeen years. This episode goes deep on something most founders avoid talking about in public: the actual mechanics of funding a food startup without giving away equity, without accumulating debt you can't repay, and without signing something that ends your journey before it begins. Andres breaks down the exact funding construction Favamole used, combining a grant from Stichting DOEN, a co-financed arrangement with the Rabo Foundation, and a convertible grant structure most founders have never even heard of. But the real lesson isn't financial. It's about timing. In this conversation, Andres reveals: Why the biggest funding mistake founders make is starting to look when they're desperate, and what to do insteadHow a convertible grant works: you only pay it back if you succeed, and why that changes everything psychologicallyWhy Favamole split its funding plan across two organizations on purpose and what transparency had to do with itWhat Colombia's 53-year civil war accidentally protected, and why it makes it one of the most exciting food systems on the planet right nowWhy he went to a Latin American summit and refused to ask for anythingAnd what meeting his father after 17 years taught him about how to show up in a negotiation🙏 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!  👋 GET IN TOUCH WITH US 👥 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Linkedin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 📸 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠🌎 ⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠

    33 min
  5. Innocent: He Went to Uganda's Villages And 500 Conversations Later, He Built a Business Farmers Actually Want with Innocent (Olur) Ociti founder Kicente EcoLogic

    27 May

    Innocent: He Went to Uganda's Villages And 500 Conversations Later, He Built a Business Farmers Actually Want with Innocent (Olur) Ociti founder Kicente EcoLogic

    What if the only way to build a business farmers actually want is to shut up, sit down, and have 500 conversations first? In this episode of Tomorrow's Bites, we sit down with Innocent Ociti, founder of Kicente EcoLogic in Uganda a former humanitarian worker who left the offices of UNDP to go village by village, garden by garden, learning what smallholder farmers actually need. Not what they say in groups. Not what shows up in reports. What they reveal over a local brew when their guard finally comes down. What Innocent built is not a typical agri-input business. It's a farmer-led distribution network where communities appoint their own trusted experts, organic inputs are tested in demo gardens before they ever reach a field, and credit is extended so farmers can pay after harvest. It took counterfeit seeds wiping out two sub-counties' worth of maize to show him where to begin and 500 individual conversations to show him how. We explore: Why talking to farmer groups taught Innocent almost nothing and what changed the moment he walked into their gardensHow two entire seasons were lost selling the right inputs the wrong wayWhy farmers don't buy because of health benefits and what they actually care aboutHow communities, not founders, should choose who leads a farmer networkWhat it costs to build trust in a place where agriculture is still seen as the last resortWhy 500 one-on-one conversations is the bare minimum before you think you understand a market This is a story about deep listening as a business strategy and what happens when someone from the outside earns the right to belong. 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!  👋 GET IN TOUCH WITH US 👥 Linkedin 📸 Instagram 🌎 Website 😊 The Guest: Innocent (Olur) Ociti

    1hr 5min

  6. 20 May

    The Part Listeners Didn't Skip: The Food Content Strategy that got Wendy The Food Scientist +600K Followers - from our conversation with Wendy Luong

    Seven months of daily posting lead her to a burnout for only 5,000 followers. Most people would quit. Wendy Luong didn't; she just stopped copying others and started being herself: A food scientist with a Chinese mom and a lab full of ideas. That shift changed everything. One video about boiling tofu, combining science and her mother's wisdom, brought her 100,000 followers overnight. With Wendy, we unpack the exact content strategy behind her growth, and why your expertise is already your biggest asset. In 12 min you learn how to stop guessing and start building a content strategy that actually works.

    10 min
  7. Honey and Bunny: How Food Designers Help Food Founders To Think Beyond The Ordinary— with Martin Hablesreiter and Sonja Stummerer, Food Designers.

    13 May

    Honey and Bunny: How Food Designers Help Food Founders To Think Beyond The Ordinary— with Martin Hablesreiter and Sonja Stummerer, Food Designers.

    Most food founders obsess over ingredients and market fit. But they barely wonder about why food looks the way it looks. In this episode of Tomorrow's Bites, we sit down with Martin Hablesreiter and Sonja Stummerer, the Austrian duo behind Honey and Bunny, to challenge everything food founders think they know about why people actually eat what they eat. They are architects turned food designers turned performance artists, and their work has been quietly dismantling the most rational assumptions in the food industry for over two decades. Martin and Sonja are specialists in provoking. They've hidden scientists in dinner audiences, made people dig food out of soil with their bare hands, filmed inside Queen Victoria's private toilet for a sandwich performance, and smashed a plate of leftovers onto the floor of a Milan department store to make food waste visible in a way no conference ever could. But behind the theater is a serious argument: food founders are thinking too rationally about a completely irrational world. In this conversation, they reveal: Why 200 shapes of pasta exist and what that exposes about the myth that design follows functionWhy lab-grown meat will never replace meat, but might succeed as something entirely newHow a room of 15 EU food scientists all agreed on the "most sustainable sandwich", and why that moment exposed the absurdity of one-size-fits-all food policyWhy is food the only material on earth that can make the most stressed person on the street stop and listenThe iron triangle of science, politics, and economy that quietly engineered today's industrial food system and why that also means we can change itAnd why the biggest barrier to sustainable eating isn't knowledge or willpower, it's that people think they're aloneIf you build, brand, or communicate anything in food, this episode will make you rethink where innovation actually starts. 🙏 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!  👋 GET IN TOUCH WITH US 👥 ⁠Linkedin⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 😊 The guest: ⁠Martin Hablesreiter & Sonja Stummerer 🌎 ⁠⁠Website⁠

    1hr 8min

  8. 6 May

    The Part Listeners Didn't Skip: Why Your First Product Should Look Cheap and Ugly - from our conversation with the Co-Founder of Collie, Daniel Reisman

    What if the ugliest product in the room turned out to be the most revolutionary? Most founders wait until things look polished before showing them to the world. Daniel Reisman did the opposite: he strapped a phone to a cow's neck, turned on vibration mode, and started a farming revolution. His co-founder Chris built a black box full of spaghetti wires, handed it to a skeptical farmer, and pushed a button. The cows stood up and walked to the barn. That was enough. With Daniel, co-founder of Collie, we explore why done and ugly beats perfect and invisible every time. In 14 min you learn why your first product just needs to work. Listen to the full episode here

    13 min
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About

Food is a problem and this podcast is full of solutions. The food entrepreneurs fixing it are building the most interesting companies in the world. Tomorrow's Bites, hosted by Andrés and Sjacco, gets inside the playbooks of the founders, farmers, investors and operators scaling food businesses that actually matter, and shaping what ends up on tomorrow's plate. If you're building a food startup, working in the food industry, or just hungry to learn from the people reshaping it, this podcast is for you.

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