Greetings to 3,000+ Impact Supporters! 🌍 This is Jonas writing 👋 Today, we’re talking about food, not as in sharing great recipes, but as in one of the biggest systemic problems (and opportunities) on the planet.

Food touches climate, health, geopolitics, culture, and everything in between. And while energy has dominated the green transition conversation for years, food has been quietly underfunded by VCs. And that’s slowly starting to change 💡

In this episode, I’m joined by Bodil Sidén, founding partner of Kost Capital, a Copenhagen-based €20M fund (and venture studio, and R&D platform) backing the next generation of food companies across Europe. Bodil brings sharp pragmatism to a space too often defined by wishful thinking, and she’s not afraid to say the quiet parts out loud.

So, let’s dig in! 🍴

📋 What’s Inside

🌍 A System That Touches Everything – Why food is both the problem and the solution🐴 Never Bet on the Consumer – The Trojan horse strategy at the heart of Kost’s thesis🏭 Improving the Factory, Not the Oranges – Why the first two waves of food tech missed the mark💧What’s in the Swedish Water? – Lessons from Stockholm’s ecosystem boom🤖 AI Meets a 0.1x Industry – The most under-digitised vertical is also the most exciting🛒 Health as the Wallet Issue – Why health, not climate, gets food onto the shelf🌾 Food as a Strategic Asset – Resilience, regionalisation, and Europe’s opening

👩‍💼 Meet Bodil Sidén

Bodil’s path into food investing runs through politics, media, and the operator world before landing in VC. She built her early career across Swedish public life and communications, then spent years close to founders and capital before deciding the most important problem she could spend the next decade on was the food space.

Bodil’s path into food investing is anything but linear. She began her career in Swedish politics, drawn early to questions about how societies make decisions and where real change actually happens. From there she moved into tech and scaling, taking leadership roles at Uber in the Nordics and later at Bellbird, before joining blq Invest VC as a Partner. She then spent years close to founders and capital before deciding the most important problem she could spend the next decade on was the one we all sit down to three times a day 💡

What pulled her into food wasn’t an industry interest. It was a systems interest. The more she looked across climate, health, geopolitics, and culture, the more she saw the same answer staring back: food sits at the centre of nearly everything that matters, and almost nobody is building the venture infrastructure to actually fix it.

Today, as General Partner of Kost Capital in Copenhagen, Bodil leads investments and operations across a fund designed to do exactly that. She’s also a vocal advocate for the broader Nordic ecosystem, a regular voice on what’s working (and what isn’t) between Stockholm and Copenhagen, and, in her own words, a picky eater with a lifelong loyalty to porridge 🥣

Her work is animated by a simple conviction: the best impact investing doesn’t ask people to change. It quietly changes what’s already in front of them.

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🌍 A System That Touches Everything

Bodil doesn’t mince words about why food matters. It is, in her telling, the centre of everything the sun touches: climate, health, security, equality, culture, belonging. Every problem capitalism has with the planet shows up somewhere in the food system, and so does every potential solution.

“It’s a tough competition between health and climate, and they often can be solved hand in hand. How you solve it is maybe not where it’s most broken, but maybe where the consumers are.”

That instinct, to meet people where they are rather than where you wish they were, runs through everything Kost does. Climate is abstract. Health is immediate. Lead with what people feel in their bodies, and the climate wins follow 💚

🐴 Never Bet on the Consumer

If there’s one mantra Bodil returns to throughout the conversation, it’s that you should never bet on consumers changing. You should be obsessed with how they behave, but you should never try to change them.

She uses herself as Exhibit A: She has eaten the same porridge for breakfast since she was six. No one, she says cheerfully, is touching her porridge. But the oats in the porridge? The spices? The protein blend? Those are fair game. That’s the Trojan horse, a B2B-first thesis hiding inside a consumer-facing problem. Change what’s already on the plate rather than asking anyone to eat insects for lunch 🐎

🏭 Improving the Factory, Not the Oranges

Kost backs ingredients, enabling tech, and platforms that improve how food is made, not the finished product itself. Bodil draws a sharp analogy to early software: nobody invested in pencils and paper. They invested in ERP and CRM, the business-critical infrastructure that made companies run better. Food is overdue for the same shift.

The first wave of food tech (roughly 2017 to 2020) gave us Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and Oatly. Generalist VCs piled in with SaaS playbooks, then realised dairy margins of 5 to 7 percent don’t behave like software and quietly backed out. The second wave leaned on precision fermentation borrowed from pharma, promising technology but built for MedTech economics. Kost’s bet is on the third wave: inputs and ingredients with SaaS-like gross margins, quietly upgrading the entire supply chain from the inside.

“The gross margin on a colorant is maybe 60 to 65 percent. That’s close to SaaS margins now.” 🔧

💧What’s in the Swedish Water?

Bodil joined us in Denmark from Stockholm, where the start-up energy right now is genuinely electric. So, we had to ask: what’s the secret?

Some of it is structural. Sweden built a sophisticated capital market in the 90s, IPO’d unicorns early (Spotify, Skype), and has had decades of liquidity flywheels turning. Founders exit, become angels, start new companies, and the cycle compounds. Some of it is cultural: a dense, passionate, weekend-working founder community that treats start-up building as a craft, not a 9 to 5.

Denmark, she argues, is on its way, but still needs a few things to fall into place: a healthier liquidity environment for mid-cap companies, more family offices willing to back venture funds instead of defaulting to real estate, and a builder mentality that’s a little less polite about working weekends. We’ll get there ❤️🤍

🤖 AI Meets a 0.1x Industry

Food is among the most under-digitised verticals in the world. The average European farmer is 65. R&D still relies on physical bioreactors, sawdust, and weeks of waiting for results. Which is exactly why Bodil sees the AI upside as enormous.

“We have an opportunity to go from like 0.1 to 10x that instantly. Any food company that’s starting now can be an AI-first company.”

She imagines pre-testing new fats or proteins in silico before firing up a fermentation tank, recipe development cycles measured in hours rather than months, and data treated as a core strategic asset from day one. Her plea to the rest of the ecosystem: bring talent from other verticals into food. The fintech operators, the SaaS PMs, the infra engineers. Food needs the cross-pollination 🧬

🛒 Health as the Wallet Issue

The fastest-growing pockets Bodil is watching aren’t where you’d expect. Forget Gen Z. Look at boomers: fat wallets, active lives, and a biological reality that nutrition science is only beginning to catch up with. A 70-year-old today, she points out, is the new 50. They’re finishing marathons and travelling the world, but they also need bioavailable nutrients designed for the bodies they actually have.

And women’s health, where the surface has barely been scratched. Cycle-aligned nutrition, perimenopause, the link between what we eat and our mood and cognition. Both segments are wide open, both have real willingness to pay, and both have been chronically underserved by an industry that has spent two decades arguing about plant-based burgers 🥛

🌾 Food as a Strategic Asset

Geopolitics has put food security firmly back on the agenda. The war in Ukraine reminded Europe how much of its grain, seeds, and flour came from one corner of the continent. Climate volatility is hitting coffee, cacao, and staple crops. Corporates can’t plan their supply chains, and the cost of that uncertainty is showing up on shelves.

“Investing into food can actually bring both resilience and prosperity for the population. Europe has a massive opportunity to build sustainable, healthy, really cool products. But that requires less regulation and much more aggressive builder mentality.”

Regional production, diversified crops, and home-grown alternatives to fragile global supply lines: that’s a strategic agenda the continent can actually win on 🌾

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✨ Closing Thoughts

Bodil’s work with Kost Capital reminds us that fixing the food system is not a single bet on a single breakthrough 🍴 It is the slow, deliberate work of changing the inputs, the infrastructure, and the economics that sit beneath every plate 🌾 Her conviction is that real change rarely comes from asking people to be different. It comes from quietly making the better option the more obvious, more affordable, more delicious one 💚 That belief shapes every part of how Kost invests, from the ingredients in your morning porridge to the bioreactors that might one day replace whole supply chains 🧪

Kost shows that impact in food is not a marketing layer or a future ambition. It is built into the daily choices of how a fund is structured, which founders get backed, and which problems the team chooses to solve 🔧 It is about meeting consumers where they actually are, supporting science-led founders with both capital and craft, and treating health, climate, and resilience as parts of the same equation rather than competing priorities 🌍 In doing so, Kost proves that pragmatism and ambition are not opposites. When guided by conviction, curiosity, and a stubborn refusal to settle for happy forecasts, a fund can help reshape one of the most stubborn systems on the planet, one ingredient at a time ✨

📥 Tell Us What You Think: Where do you think food tech is heading next, brands, ingredients, or something else entirely? Reply to this newsletter or drop us a note at ImpactSupporters@thefootprintfirm.com.

👋 Thanks for reading,

Jonas

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit impactvc.substack.com

Food, Pragmatism, and the Third Wave: A Conversation w/ Bodil Sidén from Kost Capital 🍴

Impact Supporters

Food, Pragmatism, and the Third Wave: A Conversation w/ Bodil Sidén from Kost Capital 🍴