Dive Brief:
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Ingredion has developed an initiative to help food and beverage startups grow more efficiently. The new program, "Ingredion for Emerging Businesses," advises newcomers on scaling-up production, developing new on-trend items and providing ingredient solutions, according to Food Business News.
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The incubator will feature an e-commerce platform with a range of ingredients available for online purchase. Ingredion said partners will have access to its proprietary consumer research and market insights — including resources specially designed for emerging businesses to help grow faster.
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“We understand that entrepreneurs wear many hats and want to draw on partner resources and capabilities to find the right ingredients, solve product and formulation challenges and get to market faster,” Evan Hyman, director of Emerging Business at Ingredion, told Food Business News. “Ingredion has the expertise to address many challenges start-ups face and can provide customer and market insights to help emerging businesses develop and bring trend-setting products to market."
Dive Insight:
Ingredion is the latest company to launch an arm to help startups, and this is just one of many projects the Illinois-based producer of sweeteners, starches, nutrition ingredients and biomaterials has taken on recently. Last year, Ingredion started looking for ways to collaborate with probiotic companies to develop targeted prebiotics.
Increasingly, Big Food companies are launching investment arms and then investing money and other resources into startups whose ideas might eventually find their way into the larger firm's portfolio. General Mills, Hain Celestial, Danone, Tyson Foods, Kellogg and Barilla are just some of the major brands involved in the trend. Other companies — Chobani, Land O'Lakes, and now Ingredion — have taken the incubator route to foster innovation both in their own areas of expertise and in new categories that could help them down the line.
Ingredion, a Fortune 500 company with about 11,000 employees worldwide, has plenty of resources and expertise to offer. The incubator approach is much less risky than making direct investments in startups or relatively new companies that may not pan out, particularly those with a large price tag. Any product or business that a bigger company ultimately gets involved in from this process, is a bonus. Big Food also likely is able to glean insight into research and manufacturing that may be new to them.
Without a crystal ball, executives have no sure way to predict whether an acquisition is going to work out as hoped, but helping startups gives manufacturers a relatively low-risk chance to grab new talent or products before a competitor does.