The growth cycle of most small businesses that make their start in a shared kitchen or kitchen incubator is different from a business operating within its own space. Both face the normal challenges of scaling and the capital needed to support their growth, but businesses operating from a shared or incubator kitchen face the question […]
At New Venture Advisors we partner with our clients to help them plan and implement important food systems initiatives that provide significant and meaningful outcomes to the communities they serve. These projects sometimes require creative, small-scale approaches to increasing access to fresh, healthy and nutritious food—often by organizing existing assets and resources within the community […]
Food System Planning: What is it? Why do it? Cities and counties across the U.S. create Master Plans or Comprehensive Plans to lay out their community’s vision for land use, economic development, transportation, health, and other dimensions of civic life. These plans are regularly updated to reflect the changing community context. Mobile markets, urban agriculture, […]
“Let thy food be medicine and medicine be thy food,” reads the famous Hippocrates quote that opens many forays into the topic. Imagine a world where nutritious food can combat illness and drug dependency. While the food-as-medicine movement has been around for decades, its prevalence in modern medicine is once again appearing in headlines, with […]
The 2018 Farm Bill brought hemp to the forefront of conversations across the US agricultural industry and among consumers in general as it broadly legalized hemp after nearly five decades of the crop being banned. While farmers, businesses, investors, and consumers generate excitement about this newly legalized industry, many are concerned about the exact details […]
New Venture Advisors helps strengthen businesses that are a part of the good food supply chain. On our blog we’ve written about how traditional supply chain economics does not account for unprofitable externalities like the quality of life, soil health, trusting relationships, and community empowerment. In our recent work with two Indigenous communities we’re now […]
We have had the opportunity to work with a great many businesses, nonprofits, and government entities that are making significant impacts within the good food industry. One of the biggest barriers we’ve witnessed in moving forward with an idea or scaling operations is the ability to secure funding. Even businesses with a revenue generating stream […]
One year ago today we launched the NVA Toolsite. We built it with the hope that it would help teams embarking on food system enterprise projects better understand the local market landscape and the most important factors to consider when evaluating the viability of their endeavors. Through interacting with the tools, we envisioned that teams […]
New Venture Advisors launched the MarketSizer® and HubSizer® Toolsite earlier this year to enable anyone to conduct preliminary assessments of various types of food system infrastructure. The results allow users to refine their food business concepts and due diligence plans. The Toolsite has been used by more than 1,000 visitors since March 2018. We surveyed […]
A microblog series on the HubSizer® and MarketSizer® tools from New Venture Advisors Are you a food hub that sees surges from your farmers in broccoli in the summer or beets in the fall? Have you been trying to figure out how to take advantage of a big glut of produce during the growing season […]