Tomorrow's Bites with Andrés and Sjacco

Hosted by Andrés and Sjacco

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220

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Jun 2026

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About the show

Food is a problem and this podcast is full of solutions. The food entrepreneurs fixing it are building the most interesting companies in the world. Tomorrow's Bites, hosted by Andrés and Sjacco, gets inside the playbooks of the founders, farmers, investors and operators scaling food businesses that actually matter, and shaping what ends up on tomorrow's plate. If you're building a food startup, working in the food industry, or just hungry to learn from the people reshaping it, this podcast is for you.

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60 recent

June 10, 202655 min

Why Blockchain Is Going To Change Agriculture and Food Businesses Forever - with Neil Smith, Co-Founder of Grow

The farmer knows more about your food than anyone. But he doesn't own a single byte of data about it. Someone else does and they're not sharing the value back.In this episode of Tomorrow's Bites, we sit down with Neil Smith, co-founder of Grow, to unpack one of the most counterintuitive arguments in food right now: that blockchain, the technology most people associate with crypto speculation, might be the most powerful tool farmers have ever been handed.Neil didn't come from tech. He grew up farming in Canada, barely scratching two pennies together in bad years, watching a market system that rewarded yield over nutrition and stripped farmers of any real voice. His youngest sister has stage four cancer, brought on by what he describes as the failures of our food system. That's not theory for him. It's personal.What he built with Grow isn't a crypto play. It's a ledger that nobody can manipulate, and the first blockchain built specifically around the utility of feeding people, not the speculation of trading tokens.In this conversation, Neil reveals:Why farmers are the most data-rich people in the food chain, and the least compensated for itHow Grow's first validation case was tracing regenerative food from a single farm to Amazon's Climate Pledge Arena, and why that changed everythingWhy the biggest obstacle to fixing the food system isn't consumer behavior, it's yield, and the entire economic model built around itHow a convertible blockchain token creates real utility without ever needing to flip back to fiat currencyWhy it's older farmers, not younger ones, who are the first to adopt what Grow is building, and what that says about the future of the family farmThe assumption that almost derailed the whole project: that change has to come from the ground upAnd why 20,000 community members in two years, 60% of them farmers, convinced him that the timing might finally be rightThis is a conversation about trust, data sovereignty, and what it actually takes to build technology that serves the people growing our food, not the companies selling it.If you work in food, agriculture, or impact investment and you've ever wondered whether blockchain is real or just noise, this episode will change how you think about it.GOT SOMEONE IN MIND? ⁠TELL US⁠ WHO WE SHOULD BRING NEXT.🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you like our podcast please leave us a review on your favourite platform – even one sentence helps! Thank you for your support; it helps the show a lot and it helps others to discover the show! 👋 GET IN TOUCH WITH US👥 ⁠Linkedin⁠📸 ⁠Instagram⁠⁠🌎 Website⁠😊 The Guest: ⁠Neil Smith⁠The company: GrowThe community: Grow Skool

June 3, 202633 min

Building in Public #8: How To Secure Funding As A Food Startup In Your First Year - With Andres Jara Co-Founder Of Favamole

Most food startups run out of money before they run out of ideas. The ones that don't share one thing in common: they started planting before they were hungry.In this Build in Public episode of Tomorrow's Bites, Andres Jara is back with a month that took him from securing funding in the Netherlands to speaking on stage at a regenerative agriculture summit in Colombia, and seeing his father for the first time in seventeen years.This episode goes deep on something most founders avoid talking about in public: the actual mechanics of funding a food startup without giving away equity, without accumulating debt you can't repay, and without signing something that ends your journey before it begins. Andres breaks down the exact funding construction Favamole used, combining a grant from Stichting DOEN, a co-financed arrangement with the Rabo Foundation, and a convertible grant structure most founders have never even heard of.But the real lesson isn't financial. It's about timing.In this conversation, Andres reveals:Why the biggest funding mistake founders make is starting to look when they're desperate, and what to do insteadHow a convertible grant works: you only pay it back if you succeed, and why that changes everything psychologicallyWhy Favamole split its funding plan across two organizations on purpose and what transparency had to do with itWhat Colombia's 53-year civil war accidentally protected, and why it makes it one of the most exciting food systems on the planet right nowWhy he went to a Latin American summit and refused to ask for anythingAnd what meeting his father after 17 years taught him about how to show up in a negotiation🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you like our podcast please leave us a review on your favourite platform – even one sentence helps! Thank you for your support; it helps the show a lot and it helps others to discover the show! 👋 GET IN TOUCH WITH US👥 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Linkedin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠📸 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠🌎 ⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠

May 27, 20261 hr 4 min

Innocent: He Went to Uganda's Villages And 500 Conversations Later, He Built a Business Farmers Actually Want with Innocent (Olur) Ociti founder Kicente EcoLogic

What if the only way to build a business farmers actually want is to shut up, sit down, and have 500 conversations first?In this episode of Tomorrow's Bites, we sit down with Innocent Ociti, founder of Kicente EcoLogic in Uganda a former humanitarian worker who left the offices of UNDP to go village by village, garden by garden, learning what smallholder farmers actually need. Not what they say in groups. Not what shows up in reports. What they reveal over a local brew when their guard finally comes down.What Innocent built is not a typical agri-input business. It's a farmer-led distribution network where communities appoint their own trusted experts, organic inputs are tested in demo gardens before they ever reach a field, and credit is extended so farmers can pay after harvest. It took counterfeit seeds wiping out two sub-counties' worth of maize to show him where to begin and 500 individual conversations to show him how.We explore:Why talking to farmer groups taught Innocent almost nothing and what changed the moment he walked into their gardensHow two entire seasons were lost selling the right inputs the wrong wayWhy farmers don't buy because of health benefits and what they actually care aboutHow communities, not founders, should choose who leads a farmer networkWhat it costs to build trust in a place where agriculture is still seen as the last resortWhy 500 one-on-one conversations is the bare minimum before you think you understand a marketThis is a story about deep listening as a business strategy and what happens when someone from the outside earns the right to belong.GOT SOMEONE IN MIND? TELL US WHO WE SHOULD BRING NEXT.🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you like our podcast please leave us a review on your favourite platform – even one sentence helps! Thank you for your support; it helps the show a lot and it helps others to discover the show! 👋 GET IN TOUCH WITH US👥 Linkedin📸 Instagram🌎 Website😊 The Guest: Innocent (Olur) Ociti

May 20, 202610 min

The Part Listeners Didn't Skip: The Food Content Strategy that got Wendy The Food Scientist +600K Followers - from our conversation with Wendy Luong

Seven months of daily posting lead her to a burnout for only 5,000 followers. Most people would quit. Wendy Luong didn't; she just stopped copying others and started being herself: A food scientist with a Chinese mom and a lab full of ideas. That shift changed everything. One video about boiling tofu, combining science and her mother's wisdom, brought her 100,000 followers overnight. With Wendy, we unpack the exact content strategy behind her growth, and why your expertise is already your biggest asset. In 12 min you learn how to stop guessing and start building a content strategy that actually works.

May 13, 20261 hr 8 min

Honey and Bunny: How Food Designers Help Food Founders To Think Beyond The Ordinary— with Martin Hablesreiter and Sonja Stummerer, Food Designers.

Most food founders obsess over ingredients and market fit. But they barely wonder about why food looks the way it looks.In this episode of Tomorrow's Bites, we sit down with Martin Hablesreiter and Sonja Stummerer, the Austrian duo behind Honey and Bunny, to challenge everything food founders think they know about why people actually eat what they eat. They are architects turned food designers turned performance artists, and their work has been quietly dismantling the most rational assumptions in the food industry for over two decades.Martin and Sonja are specialists in provoking. They've hidden scientists in dinner audiences, made people dig food out of soil with their bare hands, filmed inside Queen Victoria's private toilet for a sandwich performance, and smashed a plate of leftovers onto the floor of a Milan department store to make food waste visible in a way no conference ever could.But behind the theater is a serious argument: food founders are thinking too rationally about a completely irrational world.In this conversation, they reveal:Why 200 shapes of pasta exist and what that exposes about the myth that design follows functionWhy lab-grown meat will never replace meat, but might succeed as something entirely newHow a room of 15 EU food scientists all agreed on the "most sustainable sandwich", and why that moment exposed the absurdity of one-size-fits-all food policyWhy is food the only material on earth that can make the most stressed person on the street stop and listenThe iron triangle of science, politics, and economy that quietly engineered today's industrial food system and why that also means we can change itAnd why the biggest barrier to sustainable eating isn't knowledge or willpower, it's that people think they're aloneIf you build, brand, or communicate anything in food, this episode will make you rethink where innovation actually starts.🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you like our podcast please leave us a review on your favourite platform – even one sentence helps! Thank you for your support; it helps the show a lot and it helps others to discover the show! 👋 GET IN TOUCH WITH US👥 ⁠Linkedin⁠📸 ⁠Instagram⁠😊 The guest: ⁠Martin Hablesreiter & Sonja Stummerer🌎 ⁠⁠Website⁠

May 6, 202613 min

The Part Listeners Didn't Skip: Why Your First Product Should Look Cheap and Ugly - from our conversation with the Co-Founder of Collie, Daniel Reisman

What if the ugliest product in the room turned out to be the most revolutionary? Most founders wait until things look polished before showing them to the world. Daniel Reisman did the opposite: he strapped a phone to a cow's neck, turned on vibration mode, and started a farming revolution. His co-founder Chris built a black box full of spaghetti wires, handed it to a skeptical farmer, and pushed a button. The cows stood up and walked to the barn. That was enough. With Daniel, co-founder of Collie, we explore why done and ugly beats perfect and invisible every time. In 14 min you learn why your first product just needs to work.Listen to the full episode here

April 29, 20261 hr 8 min

Maarten: How Staying Small Can Change Everything, Maarten's Model for Local-First On A Global Scale with Maarten Klop from Grounded

What if the key to changing the global food system is refusing to think globally?In this episode of Tomorrow's Bites, we sit down with Maarten Klop, co-founder of Grounded & Amped and community organizer behind some of the most quietly radical food and regenerative projects in the Netherlands. Maarten doesn't build empires, he builds roots. Starting with a festival on a military fortress with zero budget and a WhatsApp group, he's spent seven years proving that real trust, real food, and real change can only be built at the local level and that staying small might actually be the most powerful strategy of all.We explore:Why local identity is a competitive advantage, not a limitation and how to scale without losing itHow Grounded delivered healthy food to 80,000 families during COVID in under a week because the network was already thereThe "game metaphor" for regional food collaboration: inventory, challenge rooms, and finding the right friends with the right toolsWhy the hardest part of building regenerative food systems is the work nobody pays forWhat mycelium, Minecraft, and bottom-up organizing all have in commonHow to build a movement when the global statistics are overwhelming and why a single apple is more powerful than an IPCC reportAnd much more...GOT SOMEONE IN MIND? TELL US WHO WE SHOULD BRING NEXT.🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you like our podcast please leave us a review on your favourite platform – even one sentence helps! Thank you for your support; it helps the show a lot and it helps others to discover the show! 👋 GET IN TOUCH WITH US👥 ⁠Linkedin⁠📸 ⁠Instagram⁠🌎 ⁠⁠Website⁠😊 The Guest: Maarten Klop

April 22, 202630 min

Build In Public #7: “Our Office Burned Down, Here's What It Really Means to FavaMole” With Andres Jara Co-Founder Of Favamole

What do you do when a fire burns down your office and takes your brand story with it?In this episode of Tomorrow's Bites, we check back in with Andres Jara, Co-founder of Favamole, for another raw and unfiltered building-in-public update. Just one day after our last recording, a fire tore through Kitchen Republic, the shared workspace where Andres and dozens of other founders were building their companies. What was lost? Marketing materials, labels, and the narrative Favamole had been printing on boxes for months. What was found? A blank canvas, and the courage to finally tell a different story.We explore:Why losing everything in a fire can give you as well new opportunities as a startup.How Andres turned a crisis into community, and why hundreds reached out to support him.The pivot Favamole is making: from "alternative to guacamole" to something far bigger.Why simplicity is the hardest thing to build into a mission-driven food company.The "Law of Zunzu”, and how to actually win at trade shows.What masculine and feminine energy have to do with building a regenerative business.This episode is about more than a fire. It's about what you rebuild when you no longer have an excuse to keep telling the wrong story.Share this with a founder who needs to hear it!!🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you like our podcast please leave us a review on your favourite platform – even one sentence helps! Thank you for your support; it helps the show a lot and it helps others to discover the show! 👋 GET IN TOUCH WITH US👥 ⁠⁠⁠⁠Linkedin⁠⁠⁠⁠📸 ⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠🌎 ⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠PS: Here you can support Kitchen Republic.

April 15, 202654 min

Mustafa: How Forgotten Crops Could Fix the Food System & Why Nobody Is Growing Them Yet — with Mustafa Durgun, Founder of Sovereign Yields Initiative

We grow fewer than 20 crops to feed 8 billion people. Meanwhile, thousands of nutritious, climate-resilient crops are sitting in the ground: forgotten, stigmatized, and completely ignored by the market. Why?In this episode of Tomorrow's Bites, we sit down with Mustafa Durgun, founder of the Sovereign Yields Initiative, to expose one of the most overlooked blind spots in our food system: the crops we stopped growing not because they failed us, but because we built an entire industrial machine around the ones that did.Mustafa grew up in Istanbul, obsessed with what food represents culturally, historically, and politically. That obsession took him from selling potatoes in Germany to designing climate-resilient food projects in Angola, to now working on transforming his own family's stagnant goat farm in Turkey into a regenerative system. Along the way, he learned something most food system thinkers avoid saying out loud: farmers don't grow what's good for the planet. They grow what pays.In this conversation, Mustafa reveals:Why neglected crops carry a stigma of poverty and how that shame is the real barrier to adoptionHow to reintroduce forgotten crops without asking anyone to consciously choose themWhy the knowledge gap, the value chain gap, and the financial clarity gap are the three locks keeping these crops out of the marketWhat ready-to-use therapeutic foods could unlock for global nutrition, and why his best proposal never got fundedWhy "fully local food systems" may be more of a feel-good myth than a resilience strategyHow to navigate EU grant applications when you're working on crops nobody has researched yetAnd what food sovereignty actually means when you strip away the buzzwordsAnd much more...🙏 LEAVE A REVIEW If you like our podcast please leave us a review on your favourite platform – even one sentence helps! Thank you for your support; it helps the show a lot and it helps others to discover the show! 👋 GET IN TOUCH WITH US👥 ⁠⁠Linkedin⁠⁠📸 ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠🌎 ⁠⁠Website⁠⁠😊 The Guest: ⁠Mustafa Durgun

April 8, 202613 min

The Part Listeners Didn't Skip: Why Thinking 1,000 Years Ahead Changes Everything in Farming - from our conversation with Initiator of the 1000 Years Vision Movement, Peter Michel Heilmann

What would change if farmers stopped planning for the next season and started planning for the next 1,000 years?Most agricultural systems are built around short-term yields, annual revenues, and immediate survival. But what if the real question is not how to grow more next year, but how to protect and regenerate land for generations to come?With Peter Michel Heilmann, initiator of the 1,000 Year Vision Movement, we explore a radically different approach to farming. One that starts with understanding where you are today, then builds a roadmap toward a long-term vision that outlives you.This is not just philosophy. It is structure.From creating nonprofit trusts that protect land and values, to unlocking new forms of capital like philanthropic funding and Earth certificates, the model redefines how farms can grow without losing their purpose.But the most powerful shift is human. Instead of chasing growth, Peter Michel shares a method based on listening, feeling the land, and building relationships that emerge naturally over time.In just 14 minutes, you will discover why thinking in centuries might be the most practical decision a farmer can make today.Listen to the whole conversation with Peter Michel ⁠⁠here⁠⁠.