SOPHIA ROOKSBERRY
Staff Writer
Brian Frank wasn’t always a venture capitalist in the world of sustainable food systems and planetary health. Before founding a firm dedicated to supporting “urgent, essential technology that reshapes the global Food & Agriculture industries,” according to the FTW Ventures website, Frank studied computer science at Cornell University and eventually built a company he sold to Google in 2015.
“I realized I didn’t want to do technology for technology’s sake anymore, and I fell back on my love of food,” Frank said. “… I also studied wine while I was at Cornell. … You can produce this beverage worth hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a bottle by taking what the Earth and nature give to us and applying the greatest science and technology … to optimize the outcome.”
Inspired by this concept of using technology to enhance inherent food systems, Frank began to shift his focus in tandem with the food revolution of the mid-2010s, which he will discuss at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater. However, while witnessing the expansion of Impossible Burgers and DoorDash, Frank came to a conclusion about the tech investors of Silicon Valley.
“They get how software can be coded … and then you make another version of it and you sell it for the same money that the first version was, but there was no incremental cost in making that next version,” Frank said. “Food’s not like that. Every tomato, every head of lettuce has some incremental cost, whether it be labor or transport or storage … and the venture capitalists didn’t understand how to value this. I started as an adviser to some big venture capital funds in Silicon Valley and recognized very quickly they can’t fund the future. They won’t understand it.”
Soon, Frank began advising food companies rather than investment firms. He introduced companies like Mars and Nestlé to the emerging technology in California, but those groups also didn’t seem to understand how the two worlds could fuse symbiotically.
“Finally, I was working with some of the biggest family offices in the world, like the Richard Branson family office, trying to figure out how he applies his money from an impact lens into solving some of the biggest food and agricultural problems in the world,” Frank said. “… I said, ‘I need to put myself at that intersection because I can talk both technology and food, and I can talk impact … I did my own personal investments from 2015 to 2019, and then in 2019, we started our first venture fund to invest in the future of the food system.”
After founding FTW Ventures, the firm’s core mission revealed itself to Frank as he continued learning and growing at the crossroads of industries.
“We have to figure out how to bring responsible science and technology into this very conservative food and agriculture industry, where people are scared of what happens to their food,” Frank said. “… It’s ingrained in people’s lives. They grew up eating certain things and doing things in a certain way, but because of all these major challenges that we face, from climate change to supply chains being cut to even the war in Iran … we’re inextricably creating more problems for our food system than we’re solving.”
The answers to these questions that Frank has found so far will serve as the key points in his lecture.
“How do we accelerate abundance in a time of all these disruptions, and how is it demystifying the science and technology that needs to go into it so people will be comfortable with it and they’ll adapt it into their lives in a natural way?” Frank asked. “… I think people are really worried about coming to this conservative industry, so I’ll be talking about three major shifts in the food system and where science and technology are unlocking greater opportunity.”
The first major shift is in crop genetics and how agriculture is changing to breed crops more resilient to climate change.
“The second part will be around … better-for-you ingredients, because people are thinking about what they put in their body and they’re looking for ingredients to meet them at where their lifestyle is, and … looking at alternative ways of adding things like protein and fiber and other things back into our food system that will allow us to live happier and healthier lives and build better products that are more sustainable both for ourselves and for the planet,” Frank said.
The final shift Frank will discuss is the changing health and wellness landscape, especially given the widespread popularity of weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. With Gallup reporting 11% of U.S. citizens using these medications as of July 7, drug companies are rapidly increasing profits while food companies lose revenue.
“How do we put money back in the pockets of people that are going to feed us good nutrition versus relying on drugs and therapeutics to solve our problems for everything?” Frank asked. “GLP-1s are not a panacea of success, meaning if you start taking GLP-1s, you could experience muscle mass loss and bone density loss because you’re just not getting all the nutrients you need to sustain it. … Pandora’s box is open. We’re not going to close it at this point, so how do we provide what people will need around GLP-1s to live a happy and healthy life?”
As Frank prepares to enter his third fund with FTW Ventures and bring the lessons he has learned to the Amp stage, he said he hopes to help Chautauquans feel more comfortable with the intersections of food and science.
“[I hope to] inspire people to want to take up action, to actually go out and work with these companies and deal with these products and things like that to support the initiative, because if we keep doing the same thing over and over again, we won’t get different results,” Frank said. “… If I can do that, if people walk away and go like, ‘I want to explore this, and I don’t think science, technology and the food system is scary anymore,’ I’ve done my job.”
