Our Vision

WHY WE WORK TO FIX FOOD

Our food system is undergoing a massive transformation driven by the depletion of natural resources, the negative health impacts of an industrialized and processed food diet and growing consumer recognition that who feeds them and what they eat matters for the health of people and planet.

How we grow, produce and distribute food touches – and has a direct impact on – virtually every aspect of our lives well beyond the food we actually eat each day. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the health of our economies, the well-being of our communities and much more are affected by the production practices on farms and ranches and the often-invisible supply chains that get food to our plates.

After many decades of work by advocates, researchers and others to raise awareness about the need to think differently about our food system there is currently significant global recognition about the crises we face in food & agriculture. The awareness of the challenges in our food system has reached beyond niche or fringe interest and is affecting the decision making of the largest businesses in the food and agriculture industry.

This has driven the proliferation of accelerators, incubators, and corporate M & A activity that has increased dramatically in the last several years, creating a ripe environment for entrepreneurial activity dedicated to solving a range of issues (See our Themes).

1CC seeks to support the innovations with the greatest potential to address those challenges with scalable and capital efficient business models and technological innovations. We believe that entrepreneurs are best positioned to create lasting and meaningful change on specific aspects of our food system and it’s our mission to resource them in their pursuits to build a better system.

One example creating the opportunity for change can be found in the reversal of a trend that has driven our food system over the last century: ever increasing commodification. We believe that an over-arching trend for the next several decades is towards de-commodification.

This emerging trend is driven in part by a new generation far more focused on what they eat and where their food comes from, than recent prior generations; as well as the relentless decline in IT costs that now makes tracking and tracing food from the field to the store and plate economical.

This is a potent combination that will drive economic incentives to produce higher quality, differentiated product that can be identified, tracked, and sold at a premium relative to lower quality products.