UC Davis Innovator Fellowship bridges nutrition research and investment

Bridging the gap between academia and industry, the Innovation Institute for Food and Health (IIFH) at the University of California (UC) Davis, US, connects Ph.D. students with venture capitalist firms. The program helps students develop business and entrepreneurial skills by immersing themselves in a food and health investment partner. 

Nutrition Insight dives into IIFH’s Innovator Fellowship program with its industry partner, early-stage venture firm Supply Change Capital, and two UC Davis alums who joined the firm as Ph.D. students. 

Noramay Cadena, one of Supply Change Capital’s co-founders, sees the UC Davis partnership as a “key enabler” into business opportunities where her company lacks technical expertise. The UC Davis program fellows help the firm understand, map, and conduct due diligence on science companies. 

“For a small firm like us, tapping into this talent level would be cost-prohibitive in a normal business setting. With this partnership, we have this ability, and in return, what we can offer is extreme access and visibility into how deals get made,” says Cadena.

Expand venture access

In addition to expanding Supply Change Capital’s impact as a small team, Cadena says she and co-founder Shayna Harris aim to provide on-ramps for people from industries or backgrounds that are not typical in venture capital firms, as they did not “grow up in investment banking.” 

“Since we started, we’ve had over 30 fellows work with us in different capacities through different partnerships,” she adds. These include partnerships with UC Davis, MIT Sustainability Initiative, and HBCUvc, an organization that brings underrepresented students through a training program and places them throughout venture capital firms. 

Cadena says the partnership allows Supply Change Capital to access technical expertise and expand its impact.“Those are the talent partnerships we leverage to bring in students every year, and these students help us review deals and perform outbound hunts,” explains Cadena. “We have them map out the entire problem statement and opportunity set, and that’s how we refresh our deals and identify where to invest.” 

“For example, we tell them, we want to know what’s happening in the cold chain, who’s working on this? What are the problems, and what solutions are needed? Who’s investing here? What are the start-ups we should consider? Are there any universities with a specific interest in cold chains?” 

In addition, Supply Change Capital offers transparency and visibility into what it takes to run a venture capital firm, providing fellows an access to the firm they could not get at a larger company. “They come to our partner meetings, attend our deal flow meetings, get to see the inner workings of a firm, and have direct access to the partners.” 

Learning the business lingo

Minami Ogawa, Ph.D. in Food Science at UC Davis and co-founder of the alternative protein start-up Optimized Foods, worked with Supply Change Capital on building a landscape for the alternative protein space. She helped the firm establish an evaluation method to assess companies’ technology readiness level and establish a minimum level the firm expects from potential investees. 

She says that she was first exposed to the start-up culture at Optimized Foods, where she was involved in investor communication and fundraising, in addition to product development. Optimized Foods is a food tech start-up that leverages the power of mycelium to create better, more sustainable food products, building on a technology platform that Ogawa developed and patented as a student. 

“I realized that I was trained as a scientist, with a science mentality, and being able to talk more on the business front was challenging for me,” she explains. Through her fellowship at Supply Change Capital, she learned how investors view novel food technologies and plan investments to determine their impact and change. 

The fellowship allowed Ogawa to consider and measure the impact of scientific discoveries on society.“Being able to see who my audience is and how I should approach talking about innovative technology are important skills needed for communicating new concepts that some people might be afraid of hearing about.” 

The fellowship helped Ogawa change her perspective on technologies’ potential impact on the supply chain or society at large and how to measure that impact. Instead of only thinking about science and production, it helped her consider which scientific discoveries are more needed to change society than others. 

She highlights that Supply Change Capital also considers external factors in its investments, such as culture, aiming to get more women on company boards or more people of color as decision-makers to help trickle downstream and create more equitable companies. “In the investment and start-up spaces, many people who write the checks or are at the top of decision-making tend to be men and not people of color,” she adds. 

Building a bridge between research and industry

Jake Gonzalez, Ph.D. in molecular plant biology from UC Davis and manager of Emerging Business and Technology at Ajinomoto, says that the fellowship at Supply Change Capital helped him think differently about his career. 

“Our mentors are brought up in academia, and their mentors were brought up in academia. There’s an inherent bias to get you into that post-doctorate toward the professor tenure track. That’s been changing in recent years — it’s just not sustainable for Ph.D. scientists. Davis is a school that recognizes this and has many programs that help us apply R&D skills in other verticals.” 

Gonzalez first got exposed to the food industry and what he could accomplish there when he joined a sweetener project. UC Davis collaborated with Mars to develop a scalable production technique for a low-calorie sugar substitute. 

Gonzalez highlights that the fellowship helps contextualize research to a potential product.“I got to hear from the Mars people how they think about taking innovation from university and turning it into a meaningful product that will affect the life of someone like my grandmother.” 

He joined a fellowship at Supply Change Capital to understand the venture capital perspective on R&D. “My goal was to get my hands on as many different parts of that pipeline, from R&D to product, as I could.” 

Under the firm’s associates, he learned how an investment is made, how to calculate returns, what investors want to achieve, and what a possible incentive structure could be as an early-stage venture capitalist partner. 

Instead of pursuing a post-doctorate, he decided to help bridge the gap between industry and research. 

“The fellowship contextualized the work needed to get it from a cool paper to a project or product. We don’t usually concern ourselves about detailed unit economics in a paper,” he concludes. “It gave me a perspective I would not have gotten if I had just stayed at Davis.”