Gali Artzi, PhD, is CTO and partner, and Matthias de Kock is principal, at Peakbridge, a global VC firm investing in scalable technologies spanning ingredients, nutrition and health, and food-chain digitalization.
The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily represent those of AgFunderNews.
You want the good news or bad news first?
Let’s go with the latter: pressure hasn’t lifted and funding is low, a reality you are probably well familiar with. DigitalFoodLab puts global agrifoodtech venture funding at $3 billion in Q2 2026 vs $12.1 billion at its 2022 peak.
By their count, every quarter for the past two years or so has landed between $2.5 and $3.5 billion, and this one is no exception. PitchBook counted 107 agtech deals and 142 foodtech deals in the quarter, both eight-year lows. The constraints are unchanged; technologies have taken longer to get to market than their timelines promised, the mega-round era has ended, and a good share of the 2021 and 2022 peaks went to delivery and quick commerce.
That was a logistics bet, and the capital has not come back.
Where nutrition meets healthcare
Onto the good news: within this ostensibly bleak picture, we see very concrete opportunity, broadly speaking, where nutrition (finally) becomes part of healthcare.
Demand here is coming from several directions at once. Consumers paying directly remain by far the largest of them, but what they buy is increasingly what a physician or dietician recommends. Alongside consumers are health systems themselves, buckling under the pressure of chronic disease costs. (High-income countries spend around 10-17% of their GDP on healthcare. 70-80% of that money goes to chronic conditions, and diet is among the largest modifiable drivers of that burden).
Those systems are starting to treat nutrition as an intervention instead of the traditional pamphlet left unread in a waiting room. Digital platforms are making solutions deliverable at scale, which is why the strongest companies increasingly pair an ingredient or a formulation with a route to the patient.
GLP-1 weight loss drugs have taken much of the attention, but the shift in thinking is wider: healthspan rather than lifespan, protein as a baseline expectation, gut health extending into the gut-brain axis, gut-immune and gut-muscle pathways, women’s health moving from underserved to strategic, cognitive and emotional wellbeing, and personalization as a formulation requirement.
Watch where the money is moving
In the first week of August, two supplement companies were sold, two days apart. Procter & Gamble paid $3.8 billion for Thorne, close to eight times sales. Kirin paid CAD $2.5 billion for Jamieson, Canada’s biggest vitamin brand, about three times sales.
Both sell capsules to people who want to stay well. The difference in price is the difference in proof.
Thorne grew up in the practitioner channel, sold by doctors and dietitians, and runs clinical studies on its own formulations. It has grown 30% a year for three years, and most of its revenue comes from customers under 40, buying for sleep, energy and cognition. Jamieson has the pharmacy shelf. P&G paid more than double the multiple for the evidence and for the clinician standing behind the product.
The rest of the year’s deals make a second point: the buyer universe has widened. Bain bought Vitabiotics. Unilever added Grüns to a wellbeing unit that already holds Olly and Liquid I.V.
Ferrero, a confectioner, bought Purely Elizabeth. Consumer health, private equity, chocolate and life sciences are bidding for the same asset. Some of those are brand deals (Grüns and Purely Elizabeth among them) priced on distribution rather than on trials. The point holds for the
seller either way: a company with clinical proof can sell into every one of those pockets, which is more exit routes than anything else in food has.
Nestlé, the biggest food company in the world, is on the other side of the trade. It bought The Bountiful Company in 2021, a global manufacturer of vitamins, minerals and nutritional supplements. Five years later it agreed to sell Nature’s Bounty, Puritan’s Pride, Osteo Bi-Flex and four smaller brands with $1.2 billion of sales between them, for $1 billion, to Yellow Wood Partners.
Less than one year’s revenue for a package including the second-largest vitamin brand in America. Notably, the brands sold only have broad health claims, no clinical evidence and no clinician recommending the product.
So within five weeks the market priced both ends of the shelf. Evidence and a route to the practitioner fetched close to 8x sales; a health claim on a mass-market label fetched less than 1x. What acquirers pay a premium for is what we underwrite at Series A: evidence, and a clinician willing to stand behind it.
Embracing capex if it builds a moat
Europe draws capital-intensive companies, but that isn’t a reason to avoid it. The distinction that matters is between capex that is only a cost and capex that creates an advantage: a proprietary process, a cost position, a regulatory asset. Grants, particularly from the European Commission, carry much of that build, so a company can reach its Series A holding assets and evidence that never touched its cap table.
Other needs are real, on longer clocks
Let’s not forget there’s plenty of urgency in the rest of the sector. Geopolitics has left commodity markets and input supply exposed to decisions taken well outside any food company’s control, and that exposure is on the agenda of every procurement team in the industry.
Climate is another force, and it has become a distinct operating cost. This summer, extreme heat across Europe and the US closed production facilities under water restrictions and killed livestock at scale. Both are pushing the industry towards a need for resilience, and the technologies that do that will find capital.
Yes, they will take longer to get there. Adoption in resilience, supply chain and production technology runs on capex cycles and procurement committees, and that’s a slower clock than the one health is on.
The market is paying for proof
A real demand signal isn’t the same as easy money. The rounds that close now are fewer and later, and debt has reached its highest share of sector funding in a decade, at 18% of the total.
Capital is going to companies that have already taken risk off the table, because that’s what lenders will underwrite and, increasingly, what equity will too.
Health and nutrition positioning, on its own, buys nothing. Two things do: evidence that the product works on the endpoints that matter, and a moat that a well-funded competitor can’t easily replicate. Evidence makes the claim real; the moat makes the business defensible. Positioning gives you neither.
This is part of the filter we apply. Smart money is going to B2B companies at the intersection of data, health and nutrition: those whose evidence stands up to scrutiny, and whose biology, IP or regulatory position a competitor can’t easily replicate. Those are the companies drawing the
widening field of strategic acquirers, and the ones this market will fund.
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