Hello everyone! It seems like the whole world is on pause — and yet, on the contrary, everything is simmering here! It gives me great pleasure to share the news of and to introduce our New Aintrigud Venture Fund. At the beginning of 2020, the Fund was registered in Cyprus, and now its present volume is 5 million euros. 50% of the funds are my own, the rest is from a pool of private investors. The Fund is affiliated with our food startup accelerator Mabius. Already by May we had signed investment contracts with 11 Russian food startups, including Mabius residents. A number of them began accelerating in May, while others are developing according to individual plans. I will tell you about the projects and their success in this blog. Our plans for the future are as follows: in the next few years, we are going to analyze about 100 new projects in order to select the most promising ones and bring dozens of new food products to Russian, European and US markets.
My fellow Mabius investors and analysts are convinced that the pandemic will greatly change the food industry globally. Russia will be the first to push the trends that have already become mainstream, to other countries. It is not by chance that while more than 4 billion people were in quarantine, the joke about the reason behind oil’s minus price ran that “since Monday, OPEC+ countries have agreed to produce ginger” contained a large element of truth. This year, most of the businesses that were considered reliable, stable, and secure have stopped or slowed down dramatically due to the pandemic. But food production and mass food retail not only did not slow down, but also showed an increase in turnover.
We have studied sales metrics and see that even if those in the United States no longer cooked, they continued to order food from restaurants; whereas people in Russia began to cook mainly at home. According to the research center Romir, in April 2020, the average Russian family spent a record 46% of their budget on food — the highest reading of the index in all the time such statistics have been conducted.
Most Russian families are currently solving two problems. First: how to make a diet so as to remain healthy, increase immunity and protect oneself from viruses and diseases as much as possible. Second: how to fit all of this in with the family budget, which was reduced by a third during the pandemic — and we assume that, regrettably, by autumn it will fall even further. Our goal at Aintrigud and the Mabius food startup accelerator is to bring not only innovative but also affordable food products, with a healthy lifestyle agenda, to the market, responding to the new challenges in the era of economic crisis.
So far, HLS products are mostly a premium microtrend for hanging out, since their prices are high, and the sales network is very small. And the segment of expensive food with a healthy lifestyle agenda is clearly not going to grow: all over the world, the population’s income is projected to decline and it may take several years to restore income to pre-crisis levels.
Finally, I want to say something about the size of the Fund. Upon first glance it perhaps seems small, but our specifics are very different from IT and FINTECH. Food startups do not require large investments at the start: 10-50 thousand euros is enough to develop an MVP — in our case, it is a prototype of the product, preparing it for market entry and conducting test markets. In IT startups, you need quite different amounts – by order of magnitude. Food startups need large investments only if they are seriously scaling a product tested by the market. This is a scale we will reach after we increase the volume of the Fund this year and at the same time our residents’ projects will “grow”.
If you have an interesting project in the field of food and you are interested in becoming a resident of the center for food startups Mabius – please write a request. We would be happy to meet you!
