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Over the next decade, Re:food will help fund a professorship in sustainable science at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Why?
My inspiration to evolve from a tech investor into a food tech investor can be traced back to Stockholm Resilience Centre during the fall of 2014. I was enrolled in a program designed to study how resilience thinking, social-ecological systems and exponential technologies relate to human wellbeing, and sustainability transformations.
The program made me realize the urgent need for the global food system to undergo transformational change. Reaching this conclusion at that specific time turned out to be a pivotal moment in my professional life. Had it not been for this program, I am pretty sure I would have passed on the opportunity to invest in both Oatly and NICK’S that coming year, both of which later laid the foundation for Gullspång Re:food.
Since then, I have followed Stockholm Resilience Centre’s significant and continuous contributions to the study of sustainable food systems. They have successfully identified previously overlooked connections, levers, and actors across the food system with the ability to unlock transformational change.
We launched Gullspång Re:food in 2020 to support entrepreneurs devoted to sustainable food innovation with a systems thinking point of view. This mission builds directly upon my takeaways from Stockholm Resilience Centre. We back startups (actors) with superior technology/products (levers), led by great founders at the exact time when the market is ready (agency), targeting underinvested paradigm shifts (with neglected transformative potential) to reverse the current trajectory of the food system to a more sustainable state.
To further accelerate this transformation, Gullspång Re:food is donating a 10-year grant to fund a new professorship at the Stockholm Resilience Centre together with our mother Gullspång Invest and the IKEA Foundation. This professorship will focus on sustainable food systems and specifically how capital markets can serve as levers to drive systematic change.
As of October 2021, Beatrice Crona is appointed professor in sustainable science. She will be joining center director, Line Gordon, who earlier this year was appointed professor in sustainable food systems. Beatrice has extensive experience within oceans and fisheries governance, and serves as the co-chair of the Blue Food Assessment, as well as the Head of the Global Economic Dynamics and Biosphere Program at the Royal Swedish Academy.
We hope this support will help strengthen the much-needed synergies across the academic and private sectors while accelerating the shift toward a sustainable future.
More information about Gullspång Re:foods approach to implement academic research in daily investment activities can be found in our report, Food is Solvable, published in June 2021.
