Connecting people who are feeding the world with people who are changing the world through tech innovation
The Mixing Bowl was founded in 2013 by tech executives who had seen other industries like Telecom, Finance, Healthcare and Education benefit from connections with Silicon Valley’s IT innovation ecosystem. Among the largest industries in the world, Food & Agriculture are confronted with the daunting task of feeding billions more people while responding to new challenges around environmental sustainability, climate change, and new consumer preferences for local and organic foods, greater transparency of food information, and more convenience. In response to these challenges, The Mixing Bowl strives to stimulate the adoption of IT innovation in the Food & Agriculture industries through thought leadership and business-focused dialogue between existing industry players, start-ups, investors, and other food innovators. As a leader in the Food/Ag Tech community, we have built our network and knowledge through in-person and online information sharing, advisory services, and efforts to fund innovative companies.
Thought Leadership
As an established hub of IT innovation, Silicon Valley is recognized for its agility, openness and willingness to network with other innovators. The Mixing Bowl strives to connect Food, Agriculture and IT innovators from around the world and develop strong ties between Food & Ag innovation hubs within California, across the US, and globally. This dialogue and information sharing is made through our research and publishing, speaking engagements, events, and our social media channels on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
Advisory Services
A key goal of The Mixing Bowl is to help create innovative, profitable, and scalable Food & Agriculture businesses by helping large, corporate partners to identify potential external innovation, academic and non-profit institutions to develop their innovation outreach, and start-ups to accelerate their growth by expanding their network. Through our advisory services, our team applies an unparalleled combination of proven strategic expertise, corporate innovation execution, specialized sector knowledge, and extensive industry relationships across startups and incumbents to deliver a tailored approach for our partners.
Funding Activities
To support adoption of new technology in the Food & Ag sectors, The Mixing Bowl team recognizes the need to solve for funding challenges. Our team is networked in the venture capital community and well known in the FoodTech and AgTech funding community. We have been successful in connecting funders with curated deals and helping start-ups find appropriate funding sources through our Better Food Ventures.
Fundamentally, The Mixing Bowl looks to harness its knowledge, network, funding and experience to make a positive impact now in the food and agriculture sectors.
We harness those resources through engaging with like-minded organizations, such as the UC Davis Innovation Institute for Food & Agriculture (where we are a founding advisory partner) that “catalyzes and supports uncommon collaborations to address global nutritional challenges.” We also convene problem-solvers ourselves when we see an unmet need. One such example is the IDEA consortium.
The Interoperable Data to Enhance Agriculture (IDEA) consortium is an effort to strengthen the ties of those organizations developing and promoting adoption of open and interoperable data schemes and interfaces across agriculture production sectors and geographies. You can find an overview of the IDEA concept here.