Danone, PepsiCo among founders of new China food tech platform

Danone, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola are among the ten founding members of a new platform in China that enables start-ups to cooperate with global companies.

Called the China Food Tech Hub, the model has been launched by Chinese start-up accelerator and venture capital firm Bits x Bites.

Shanghai-based Bits x Bites wants the model to offer a smarter way to innovate, tackle business challenges and create new growth opportunities.

Through regular meetings, the companies will exchange insights and work with food tech start-ups to explore pilot projects and other forms of collaboration.

All of the founding member companies in the China Food Tech Hub are multinationals that are looking to grow their presence in the Chinese market and increase their cooperation with early-stage food tech companies.

The founding members are: Coca-Cola, Danone, General Mills, Givaudan, Griffith Foods, Louis Dreyfus Company, Novozymes, Nutreco, PepsiCo Greater China and Puratos.

Bits x Bites founder and managing director Matilda Ho said: “Like most parts of the world outside of EU and US, food tech is still in its infancy in China and there hasn’t been a strong ecosystem to support start-ups in this space.”

She added: “We see an opportunity to bridge and strengthen these partnerships and hopefully make it easier for start-ups and corporations to share insights and work together.”

David Machiels, R&I director Asia expansion and innovation acceleration at Danone, added: “The Chinese market evolves at an incredibly fast pace. To maintain our edge in the categories where we play, we believe that it is key to be able to identify emerging new ingredients, technologies, product formats and business models in order to define new innovation opportunities for our consumers.

“By working with the start-up and corporate community through the China Food Tech Hub, we want to contribute to further build the food tech ecosystem in a collaborative way, feed our innovation needs and identify new project opportunities in China.”