The Diplomat
ICEX Spain Export and Investment has once again resorted to its Desafía program to support the internationalization of companies to boost the presence of the most innovative companies in the Spanish food sector in the Netherlands, which has one of the most dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystems in the world.
According to ICEX, Spain is a powerhouse in the global food industry, ranking seventh in the list of exporting countries. In addition, the FoodTech sector has an important innovative potential due to its direct impact on all links in the food chain, “reinforcing the capacity to generate new products and ingredients, sustainability and traceability in the industry and commitment to the environment”.
In the FoodTech sector, Spain has an ecosystem of more than 400 companies “that are developing cutting-edge capabilities and are called to play an essential role for the entire agri-food industry,” continued the public entity in charge of promoting the internationalization of Spanish companies.
For this reason, and in order to boost the innovation represented by the FoodTech sector, ICEX has once again resorted to Desafía, a program designed to consolidate the internationalization process of innovative companies by exposing and integrating them in key destinations. To date, two other editions of Desafia have been held in San Francisco and Tel Aviv, in collaboration with Red.es.
In this case, the target is the Netherlands, which will host the first edition of Desafía FoodTech. The initiative (whose registration period will be open until September 10) will be held between November 8 and 19 this year in Amsterdam and includes two weeks of immersion in the Dutch entrepreneurship ecosystem. There, with the help of a specialized agency, networking activities, workshops, visits to companies and scalability actions will be developed, always with the aim that Spanish companies in the FoodTech sector can come into direct contact with the main actors involved in entrepreneurship. After this period, ICEX will continue to accompany Spanish companies in new consolidation actions at events and with the main international interlocutors.
According to ICEX, the Netherlands has one of the most favorable ecosystems for entrepreneurship thanks to its various investment funds and its accelerators specialized in alternative food, several of them linked to Wageningen University, “which with its entrepreneurial spirit and with almost 120 million euros invested is generating numerous startups and scaleups”.
There are also important platforms in the country, such as Foodvalley, which brings together 1,500 new Dutch and international agricultural technology companies, with acceleration programs for startups. Moreover, there is a powerful network of food multinationals for large-scale distribution thanks to a favorable tax regime, establishment costs and its good location in terms of logistics. “All these elements make the Netherlands an optimal destination for Spanish companies in the FoodTech sector to strengthen their business models and their international dimension,” according to ICEX.