This fall, we have selected fifteen startuppers from Europe and Asia with ideas and prototypes of a food product that they want to promote on the global market. They will be participants of the first season of the internet reality show Meallions – battles of food startups. The show will be released on YouTube. Filming is jut about to begin in Riga, Latvia, where the participants are arriving in 1,5 month to compete for getting into finals and to win the prize. The participants will receive challenging tasks from their mentors, gurus of food industry themselves – specialists in marketing, branding and nutrition science. Three finalists will go to London, where they will finalize their brand and come up with a marketing conception. Then they will head off to New York where they will present their projects to investors. The final battle will take place in Singapore’s street market – whoever sells more of their product to the common people on the street, wins the big prize – $100,000.
Idea of an online reality show came to me from my previous experience of working at the center for food startups Mabius, in which I started to envision myself as an investor and as a mentor for entrepreneurs with little experience. In Mabius, we have been researching the market not only in Russia, but globally, and we constantly saw that the vast majority of startuppers think only in terms of their local markets. Muscovites think within the Garden Ring as their framework, Israelites – in Tel Aviv’s premises. But it is obviously useless to try and promote another original recipe of hummus there, as the shelves are full of other hundreds other types of it. But what you can do is think – where else, on which markets can hummus be interesting for potential buyers? Why not finding a niche in some place where there would be a greater number of potential consumers? After talking to several people, I realized that no-one does so because of the cultural barrier, and this is why me and my team have come up with an international reality show, that could make this idea trendy and easy as well as show how the modern technologies work in food industry.
I personally believe that only startuppers with their clear vision can create trends in the industry of food, and they become the major power in the global markets, not the large corporations. This is why our aim is to find those who are passionate about food, who can be brave enough to think on a larger scale, and we want to help them to fulfill their potential.
Full text (in Russian) of the article is available in the December’s issue of S7 board magazine 2017.