Investment Funding for Organic Food Leads Discussion at Investors’ Circle Conference
At the Investors’ Circle Conference in San Francisco, the Plenary Session of the May 7th Education Day was titled, “Is Organic the Next Clean Tech?” Can organic foods (and other products) can attract major investment capital, in the way clean technology has in the past few years, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.
I am not sure whether the answer is a resounding yes, but panelist Walter Robb, Co-President and COO of Whole Foods Market announced that Whole Foods will be investing in small supplier companies, and all of the panelists were positive about the potential of investing in organics.
Kristen Groos Richmond, Co-founder/CEO of Revolution Foods, who has a wonderful if improbable company, which I wrote about before, can speak first-hand about the ways entrepreneurs can attract professional investors while pursuing goals such as connecting local farmers and consumers.
However, audience members asked questions that were not easily answered, such as how do small organic farmers, who want to wait until their fruit is ripe to pick it, interface with the industrialized major grocery chains who need to receive wholesale goods on a highly scheduled basis?
The panelists, which also included Paul Dolan (former President of Fetzer Vineyards) and Fred Kirshenmann (of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture) spoke of both the initial success stories as well as the major challenges. In a corollary to the saying, “the jury is still out,” the panelists could not really answer whether capital is going to flow to organic startups on such a massive scale.
