Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Wenzel: RisingFoodStars supports later-stage scale-ups aligned with EIT Food missions

Lena Mareike Wenzel · 34 - Scaling Food Innovation: How RisingFoodStars Supports Startups in the Food Industry · Mar 25, 2025 · at 1:20

Lena Mareike Wenzel, Innovation Program Manager at EIT Food, explains the scope and mandate of the RisingFoodStars scale-up program.

0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 20.5s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And so also within Rising Food Stars, it is our scale-up It is one actually of three of our flagship entrepreneurship programs. We work with the latest stage companies, and so any of our companies that we support in that program has to basically fulfill one of those challenges.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Lena Mareike Wenzel

Insight
Wenzel: Startups Alone Cannot Disrupt the Food System
“Because you can't just have only startups, because they just won't be able to disrupt the system, right? So you need everybody else on board as well.”
Lena Mareike Wenzel Mar 25, 2025 ▶ 17:44 34 - Scaling Food Innovation: How RisingFoodStars Supports Startups in the Food Industry
Assertion Supported
EIT Impact Fund invests €500K to €1.5M in EIT Food companies
“We do have, for example, our own, we call it EIT impact fund basically operates as a VC and they invest in companies that are part of EIT food. So that's a prerequisite and they invest Anything up to 1.5 million euros per company, usually starting with about 5…”
Lena Mareike Wenzel Mar 25, 2025 ▶ 5:28 34 - Scaling Food Innovation: How RisingFoodStars Supports Startups in the Food Industry
Insight
Wenzel: Scaling Founders Must Transition to CEOs or Risk Failing
“Also you as a founder, right? You're not a founder anymore. You're basically becoming a leader, a CEO. That's a switch that people also just have to do. And sometimes, yeah, sometimes miss to do correctly.”
Lena Mareike Wenzel Mar 25, 2025 ▶ 18:32 34 - Scaling Food Innovation: How RisingFoodStars Supports Startups in the Food Industry
Insight
Wenzel: FoodTech startups struggle with commercialization rather than creativity
“Most companies come out of R&D, right? So you have a very heavy R&D focused companies usually that then all of a sudden have to be become sales organizations, right? So I think it's rather the opposite challenge that you have rather creative, inventive people …”
Lena Mareike Wenzel Mar 25, 2025 ▶ 20:36 34 - Scaling Food Innovation: How RisingFoodStars Supports Startups in the Food Industry
Disclosure
Wenzel: RisingFoodStars focuses on IP-heavy tech over B2C consumer apps
“What we work with is quite IP heavy. So we don't work with the usual B to C consumer apps though I'm sure there's great solutions out there, but what we really focus on is more of a tech heavy focus, right?”
Lena Mareike Wenzel Mar 25, 2025 ▶ 2:06 34 - Scaling Food Innovation: How RisingFoodStars Supports Startups in the Food Industry
Disclosure
Wenzel: RisingFoodStars onboards only 15 new companies annually
“We onboard only 15 new companies each year, but companies can stay with us for up to three years.”
Lena Mareike Wenzel Mar 25, 2025 ▶ 3:58 34 - Scaling Food Innovation: How RisingFoodStars Supports Startups in the Food Industry
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 100 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.