Sometimes you just get tired of waiting. Henry Dimbleby seemed too at least. After publicly expressing his frustration at the lack of action in response to his National Food Strategy in 2021 – an official review of the entire UK food system from farm to fork – Dimbleby opted to launch a new investment and advisory firm last year to step in where the British government is seemingly falling short.
Bramble Partners is a clear (albeit partial) answer to the ‘capital gap’ outlined in his food strategy which among its recommendations, called on the UK government to invest £500m in a new fund to help create a better food system.
As a venture capital fund, Bramble will start off with a more moderate £50-100m, but with an explicit aim to “help UK entrepreneurs deliver what politicians have not yet been able to.”
A more holistic approach
Dimbleby launched Bramble alongside Chris Mitchell, a former colleague from management consultancy firm Bain & Company. The pair went their separate ways only to be rekindled at COP28 in the UAE last year. While Dimbleby turned to founding Leon, a chain of British restaurants, Mitchell moved to Boston Consulting Group where he set up the company’s food systems work across Africa. He left, however, in search of a more holistic approach to tackling food systems he believes Bramble is now pursuing.
“Larger consulting firms are more focused on growth and profit and a little bit less prescriptive with regards to the environment, particularly nature and climate, and human health,” he says.
Bramble Investments is still to raise its first fund and so hasn’t yet made any investments but will deploy an investment strategy based on ‘five betters’, explains Mitchell: better production; better food; better customer decision making; better packaging; and better data.
It’s an approach closely aligned with Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy which said the UK government should invest its £500m in “accelerating work to reformulate processed foods, trying out new ways of helping customers change their habits, and boost locally led initiatives to improve diet and health…it should also be used to help develop new ways of growing food, such as vertical farming and precision fermentation.”
The fund will look to take a minority stake in Series A to growth-stage companies across the UK, Europe, and the US, taking a systems-view to how each business can affect the overall food-system.
“There aren’t many investors or advisors who are trying to balance both the environmental, climate and nature part of the food system, as well as the diet, nutrition and human health,” he explains.
London deals calling?
It can often take new VC funds many years to build up access to the best deals, but Dimbleby’s profile in the UK means many companies have already reached out in search of backing. Bramble’s presence in London should also prove beneficial, says Mitchell, given Britain is the third largest VC market in the world and has long proven itself as a global technological hub.
Sitting alongside the fund is Bramble Intelligence, a consultancy arm advising governments and major food companies on health and sustainability policies. One if its key strength is a “highly differentiated understanding” of how governments look at food systems, says Mitchell who is also the division’s managing partner, thereby enabling Bramble to help companies understand where regulation might be going and its potential impact.
“It’s not that we’re trading on proprietary government information,” he says. “I think we’re just much closer than a classic investor who’s only focused on the microeconomic realities [of a company]. And closer to understanding how the whole full national food system needs to shift.”
Bringing ‘insurgents and incumbents’ together
But Bramble’s experience spreads far and wide, says Mitchell. “We understand the activists from the NGO space. We understand the government and what they’re trying to achieve. And we understand the larger private sector players and how they think about things like product development, sourcing, formulation, marketing, branding, distribution.”
This in turn, can aid those start-ups who receive investment. “We have a system view and a system network and so smaller companies will get plugged into a wider set of actors from the public, private and social sector more quickly.”
“It’s also about recognizing the incumbents aren’t going away,” he adds. “The Cargills, the Tescos, they’re going to be here ten years from now and so if we want to change the food system, it’s really about how do we bring together the insurgents and incumbents together?”
A ‘systems view’ on food’s problems
Led by two former consultants, Mitchell points out Bramble will take a systems view on food’s problems, meaning it will “have the humility to recognize the complexity of the system and that there are negative and positive feedback loops that are often either not known or not fully understood.”
While such an approach is not necessarily unique, it means that in practice, Bramble will look to understand the system from numerous different perspectives, says Mitchell. “For every company we’re working with on either the advisory and on the intelligence or the investment side, we are trying to take a systems view. What is the economic, social, environmental, food security and human health impact that this company is having or could have.”
