As we finish another year, we look back on the milestones of 2023. At the top of our agenda has been a reorganization of Blendhub, focused on cultivating a team of top performers to drive short term profitable growth and improving everyday operations in coordination between local hubs and global teams. At the same time, we have been laying the strategic foundations on which we will grow our business rapidly over the next 3 to 5 years.
The food industry is ultra-dynamic and rapid innovation is forcing everyone to change our approach to business. We are adapting to these rapid changes by enhancing efficiency in all our operations, demanding better profitability, improving coordination in our network of hubs, and doubling down on our vision for shared value creation for our suppliers, customers, and other business partners.
To facilitate this change, we have structured the company into four business verticals in 2023, to help us position our current and future talent where they can create most value.
- Blendhub Blends & Services (known internally as 20/20) – operates our global network of hubs, ensuring existing customer satisfaction and new customer development, based on wide technical experience in various food segments shared across our network in tandem with local product adaptions. It offers functional blended solutions and industrial services.
- Blendhub New Hub Deployments – focuses on expanding our capacity as required or building strategic alliances with customers, suppliers, and financial investors for local production.
- Innovation and Co-Creation – takes care of the design and development of new products combining our internal knowledge with new data sources, offering innovation services to both our internal Blendhub teams as well as other companies and entrepreneurs. It sits at the core of the digital and cultural transformation towards our vision of becoming a global Food-as-a-Service platform.
- Chemometric Brain – is a key tool for us to offer traceability and transparency of our raw materials and blended products, thanks to its use throughout our production network. Beyond Blendhub, they offer companies with better and cheaper testing solutions for quality control, leveraging NIRS to build solutions for any food segment.
We have also reinforced our management structure with the incorporation of top professionals with contrasted experience. José Luis Fernández, our new CFO, has a strong vision on financial control, turn-around and expansion, and has joined our executive committee. Also joining our management are Víctor Núñez, leading corporate development, and Guillermo Cánovas, leading our legal department.
WEF Top Innovator
A key milestone this year has been our participation in the Humanitarian and Resilience Challenge by UpLink, a platform promoted by the World Economic Forum. We were selected as one the 10 Top Innovators in this challenge for empowering employment and entrepreneurship in vulnerable communities and contributing to a positive social impact worldwide by leading the way in a global food system change.
This has opened new opportunities for us in a segment, Human Resilience, where we until now did not have broad recognition as a supplier. Serving humanitarian organizations and collaborating with governments brings us closer to our vision of making healthy and affordable food and personalized nutrition available to all people in all places, sustainably.
Leading the transformation in the food industry
Innovation and Co-Creation had a very interesting collaboration this year with EIT Food, an EU funded food innovation engine, for the Affordable Nutrition Scale Up Challenge. 10 European startups and scale ups were selected and economically awarded for their innovative ingredients or products contributing to the promotion of healthy and sustainable diets in Europe.
Through the project, we’ve been able to establish relationships with and learn from a group of young and innovative companies, with whom we are working to bring their ideas to market in the coming months.
When 1+1 is more than 2
Core to our strategy are the partnerships with value-aligned entrepreneurs and companies to create shared value. We’d like to highlight some partnerships signed this year:
- Indespan – producing and marketing novel bakery and pastry solutions
- Upfood – developing innovative and nutritious ingredients from food surplus
- Foodiq – collaborating on the development and production of alt protein based dairy alternatives
- ColoPlus – supporting their launch of nutraceutical food products using bovine colostrum.
And we’re off to a flying start in 2024, presenting at CES in Las Vegas in January, invited by our global technology partner Siemens.
As you can see, both our business and global relationships continue to grow and we believe this to be the key to accelerate transformation of the global food system to a more efficient and sustainable one, benefitting people and planet.
I want to thank all our suppliers, customers, and many other valuable relationships, both the organizations and the people, for their trust in Blendhub. We look forward to continuing to travel this path together.
Best wishes for health, peace, and success in the new year 2024.
Founder & Chief Moonshot Officer
