Food & AgTech perspective

Last year, Wheatsheaf Group, the business we created in 2012 to diversify Grosvenor’s activities beyond property and within a sector that offered the opportunity to make a meaningful, positive and lasting difference to society, was renamed Grosvenor Food & AgTech.

The business’s Chief Executive, Graham Ramsbottom, who  was instrumental in its creation and subsequent evolution, left the organisation with our deepest gratitude for all the considerable success he helped achieve. Grosvenor Food & AgTech now operates under a new partnership model, with five managing partners leading its next phase of growth and development, while 100% ownership is retained by Grosvenor. The partners take decisions collectively in the best long-term interests of the business and its stakeholders, and work with portfolio companies to support their growth and evolution while pursuing new investment opportunities.

Over the past year, we have helped our companies through an IPO and several investment rounds to help fund their next phases of development. We have also invested in five new companies – all bringing exciting new technologies to answer key food industry challenges – from providing alternative proteins and plant-based meat alternatives to sustainable food distribution solutions.

Grosvenor Food & AgTech operates in a competitive environment where new ventures and food technologies looking to bring efficiencies to a very interconnected but largely fragmented sector are fighting for capital to develop and scale their impact and reach.

Our focus is on developing commercially successful and sustainable businesses across the food supply chain – looking at how food is grown, produced, distributed and consumed. To us ‘improvement’ means a food system that is aware of its interconnectedness, one that works with nature but that leverages the significant advances in technology and analytics to better understand the true impact and implications of food. We believe this can be done by improving its health benefits, promoting regenerative agriculture and enhancing the environment, while adequately rewarding food producers so that they are incentivised to invest in good long-term practices.

We have a high-quality and exciting investment portfolio and will continue to work alongside these businesses to help them grow and scale up their services and technologies.

Looking ahead, we are committed to investing significant new capital to expand our portfolio, doing so right across the spectrum of maturity – from seed, venture, growth and later investment stages.