Three founders. One week. Same answer: “I’d never build in food again.”
This is not an isolated thought. It is something I hear from many founders, often from behind sunken eyes and with an exasperated demeanour. In WhatsApp groups and at meet-ups that often double as self-help groups, there’s a running joke beneath the surface – an acceptance that “we must be mad”.
Recently, as I’ve picked at this further, I’ve had more than one highly respected retail buyer confide that if they ever built something, they wouldn’t build it in F&B either.
That’s when you know we have a problem. A huge one.
The talent drain
If we have an industry where, once you lift the lid, you realise it’s not a place you really want to be, then the talent drain is inevitable. I’ve seen great founders move out of the space over the past few years, often at the very point when they have the skills and battle-hardening that makes them better entrepreneurs.
Founders in other sectors tell me: “That sounds like a poor space to build. I wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole.” Startup capital takes a similarly dim view – too high-risk, too long timeframes, relatively low returns. It’s entirely understandable.
This is the very thing that sustains us, influences health and wellbeing, and shapes the future of our planet. Yet our system means that without the wide-eyed optimism of a first-time founder, talented people are unlikely to put their time into it.
The system is broken
The desire to walk away isn’t due to one factor. It’s the cumulative weight of everything that makes food hard.
Most founders don’t know what they’re building into. There’s limited accessible guidance on what product-market fit actually looks like in F&B, what channels genuinely suit their business model, or how long things really take. By the time they learn, they’ve burned through time, capital and energy.
The support systems that exist in other sectors – accelerators, mentorship programmes, sector-specific expertise – are patchy at best in food. Founders are often learning the most expensive lessons in real-time.
Where’s the joined-up thinking between encouraging food innovation, supporting crucial goals, and actually creating conditions where entrepreneurs can build towards those aims? The structure simply isn’t there.
There is so much to learn in the early years of F&B, and once you’ve learnt it, you’re a far better founder in this space. But that matters little if the biggest lesson is ultimately to look elsewhere.
What needs to change
It’s my view that founders succeeding is a win for us all – it creates innovation, instigates change, develops the next generation, and feeds the crucial funding ecosystem. We need to embrace and support that journey collectively, from government down and grassroots up.
This likely starts by getting stakeholders in a room – and I mean properly in a room. Ours is often an industry of distinct segments with limited collaboration, yet we’re all reliant on each other to meet bigger goals, particularly around areas such as health and sustainability.
This isn’t about making it easy. Food will always be hard, once you get behind its initial tangible appeal. But there’s a difference between ‘hard but achievable’ and ‘systematically hostile to anyone trying something new’. I don’t believe it’s hyperbole to say the latter is currently true.
Perhaps, in the spirit of setting goals for the year, the industry should commit to making that conversation happen. Not an event panel, or a scheme at one touchpoint – a genuine effort to identify what needs to change and who needs to change it.
Because right now, we’re haemorrhaging talent we collectively can’t afford to lose.
Andrew Allen is a consultant at Bidfood
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