Baking the Future fires up annual search for startups to revolutionise the bakery sector
Innovation is part of Europastry’s DNA, keeping it at the forefront of the sector by anticipating new trends and being the first to offer customers the products that answer consumer demand.
The company invests more than €60m annually in innovation and has one of the most avant-garde R&D centres, named Cereal and located in Barcelona. At Cereal, bakers, confectioners, engineers, chemists and nutritionists coexist, responding to the demands with around 400 new products a year and more than 1,100 projects.
“If you stop innovating you end up losing competitiveness and capacity for growth,” said Jordi Gallés, executive president of Europastry Portugal SA.
“That is why it is very important to keep reinventing yourself and never think that what you have is for life.”
Unique opportunity
It is this approach Baking the Future wants to instil in its newest cohort of startups, with the help of Google Cloud and Eatable Adventures.
The drivers for selection will be disruptive ideas and projects grounded in sustainability, improved customer experience, health and tech that improve production without losing sight of product quality
The successful applicants will be given a workspace at Cereal, mentoring sessions, access to Europastry's R&D resources and contact with the most relevant agents of the global bakery value chain.
They will also receive expert advice and support from Google Cloud to boost their digital transformation, as well as entrepreneurship and business plan sessions from Eatable Adventures, a leading food-tech accelerator in Europe and Latin America.
“Our collaboration started in 2019 with Baking the Future Challenge, a competition to improve processes and operations through the most disruptive startups in the industry and has derived into a more ambitious project with the accelerator programme,” said José Luis Cabañero, founder and CEO of Eatable Adventures.
“Being able to activate a collaboration with Europastry and accessing an R&D centre like Cereal is a unique opportunity for any startup whose innovations and technologies apply to the bakery sector.”
What you will enjoy
- A workspace at Cereal.
- Mentoring sessions with Cereal’s R&D, commercial and marketing teams, along with the Eatable Adventures and Google Cloud teams.
- Access to Cereal’s R&D department to develop, test and launch the product using the latest tech to move from lab scale to pilot scale.
- Global and direct project presentation with Europastry’s value chain agents.
The venture launched in 2021 with a €50m fund to invest in early-stage EU and Latam startups that promise a relevant impact on the agri-food value chain. To date, it has launched more than 25 corporate programmes, a deal flow of 2,200 global food-tech startups each year, and operations on our continents.
Agrain was one of the startups accelerated in the first edition of Baking the Future. The Danish startup came aboard with a sustainable idea to upcycle brewers spent grains and today has already carved a niche in the market.
“We have been part of the Baking the Future programme and this is the result: a bread made with the flour of beer waste,” said Aviaja Riemann-Andersen, cofounder and CEO of Agrain.
“Being part of Europastry has been a very good experience. We have met very astute and intelligent people who are passionate about the bakery sector.”
Interested?
Head to the Baking the Future website to apply. The second class of startups will be chosen in September, with the accelerator phase taking place between September and March 2023.
Europastry is an international company with a start-up mentality, respecting and honouring the tradition of artisanal baking but bringing it into the 21st century. The company has a 4,000-strong bakery workforce in over 80 countries, 22 production plants and 31 sales offices.
