A posting on Food Entrepreneur indicated that capital fund, Joyful Ventures, has raised $23 million to invest in sustainable protein and food technology. Areas of concentration will include, plant-based foods, mycoproteins, molecular agriculture and fermentation offering sustainability.
Jennifer Stojkovic, co-founder and General Partner at Joyful Ventures stated, “The more we can invest in the future of food and support the development, production and distribution of sustainable, scalable proteins that out-compete animal-based products on cost, taste and convenience, the more likely our food system is to adopt it”. This is a predictable aspirational statement devoid of substance and ignoring the realities of alternatives to conventional protein foods. Joyful Ventures plans on investing in up to twenty early pre-seed and seed companies. Apparently, the fund has invested in a West-coast cultivated meat company and a Canadian startup intending to produce cultured seafood.
It may well be that Joyful Ventures has come too late to the table. The future of cell-cultured meat, poultry and fish is at best questionable, despite recent approval of two companies to produce chicken-like products.
A number of cell-cultured meat companies have already failed, have been absorbed by competitors or surviving on cash burn. It is questioned how far the $23 million fund can be divided among a projected twenty prospective companies with any prospect of generating a return for investors.