“Let thy food be medicine and medicine be thy food,” reads the famous Hippocrates quote that opens many forays into the topic. The food-as-medicine movement has been around for decades, but its prevalence in modern medicine is once again appearing in headlines as physicians and medical institutions make food a formal part of treatment, rather […]
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 […]
A microblog series on the HubSizer® and MarketSizer® tools from New Venture Advisors. Do you own or have access to an entire building, space or business and want to convert it into a commercial kitchen or food business incubator but are not sure where to start? Today we’ll show you how to use the Kitchen […]
A microblog series on the HubSizer® and MarketSizer® tools from New Venture Advisors. Over the past few weeks we’ve explored how to analyze a market for local food with the Local Food MarketSizer® tool; investigated how to turn a grocery store into a food hub with the Rural Grocery HubSizer® tool; and most recently we […]
A microblog series on the HubSizer® and MarketSizer® tools from New Venture Advisors. This week we’re looking into how to use the Local Produce HubSizer® tool to estimate the economics and potential markets of a produce food hub. For this post, we’ll take you on the journey that I went through while using this tool: […]