Our Managing Partner, Lisa Feria, recently attended Future Food Tech in San Francisco. She shares her thoughts below on the shifts in food innovation, the changing landscape due to the rise of GLP-1s, and impacts from affordability.

The Food System Is Shifting Toward Health Outcomes

One theme kept coming up in every conversation: the companies winning right now aren’t just making food “better for you”, they’re making food that does something measurable for you.

That’s a real shift, and it’s worth thinking through what it means for your business.

From Avoiding Bad Things to Delivering Good Ones

For years, progress in food was defined by what you took out — less sugar, fewer additives, simpler labels. That framing still matters, but it’s no longer enough on its own. Consumers are increasingly asking what a product gives them: metabolic support, sustained energy, and gut health. Poppi and Olipop didn’t hit a combined $815M in reported 2025 sales only because they removed something. They grew because they built a credible, repeatable health story that consumers came back for.

The bar has moved. “Better-for-you” is table stakes. The question now is whether your product delivers a clear, believable, functional benefit, and whether consumers feel it.

GLP-1 Is Raising the Stakes for Every Bite

The rise of GLP-1 medications warrants close attention, even if your core customer isn’t taking one. The most recent projections estimate that 25 million Americans will be on GLP-1 therapies by 2030 (Morgan Stanley). As portion sizes shrink for a growing segment of consumers, every bite needs to work harder. Nutrient density, protein content, and functional benefits per serving are moving from differentiators to baseline expectations, particularly in snacking, alternative proteins, and prepared foods.

For ingredient and platform companies, this represents a genuine tailwind. For consumer brands, it’s a prompt to ask whether your product earns its place in a smaller daily intake.

Affordability Isn’t Just a Consumer Issue, But a Business Model Issue

Strong demand for healthier food keeps running into the same wall: cost. Food prices are up roughly 30% over the past five years (USDA), and that’s not an abstraction; it’s the reason conversion rates stall and repeat purchase drops off. The companies that break through will be the ones that close the gap between what consumers want and what they can regularly afford.

This isn’t a tweak to your pricing page. It’s a systems-level challenge that runs through ingredients, processing, and the supply chain. Companies working on efficiency and automation often get less attention than consumer brands, but they’re doing some of the hardest and most important work in the space.

What This Looks Like in Practice

A few of our portfolio companies are squarely in the middle of this shift, working on different parts of the same underlying problem.

NuCicer has partnered with Stricks Ag to deploy more than 10,000 acres of its high-protein chickpea variety in 2026. This partnership combines NuCicer’s proprietary breeding platform with Stricks Ag’s production and processing network, enabling the production of superior functional ingredients at a commercial scale.

4AG Robotics is tackling efficiency with the kind of infrastructure automation that rarely makes headlines but quietly improves the whole food system, by ensuring a stable mushroom supply.

California Cultured is producing cultivated cacao free of heavy metals and contaminants, with a focus on high-flavanol ingredients linked to reduced cardiovascular disease risk and improved cognitive function.

These aren’t isolated examples. They reflect where we believe durable value is being built across the food system.

Looking Ahead

The food system is being rebuilt around health outcomes. That’s not a trend — it’s a structural shift driven by consumer demand, healthcare realities, and economic pressure converging at the same time.

For brands, the window to differentiate on clean label alone is closing. For ingredient and enabling technology companies, the demand signal is real, but so is the pressure to deliver at accessible price points. The companies that navigate both will define the next chapter of food innovation.

At Stray Dog Capital, we remain committed to supporting the founders and teams driving this transition forward.