After a full year of operations, CFIN has a lot to be proud of – from building a national organization in a virtual environment, to creating a community of food innovators, and funding innovative food projects across Canada.
CEO @Joe Lake spoke with @CarolynCooper about some of CFIN’s accomplishments over the past 12 months. Here’s part three of the three-part series. In part one we discussed how CFIN has built an organization in the past year, and in part two we looked at how CFIN has created a community.
Funding Innovation
One of CFIN’s mandates is to provide food and beverage companies access to funding for innovation. To date CFIN has invested more than $5M through multiple funding calls under three programs: Innovation Booster, Food Innovation Challenge, and FoodTech Next. In total, CFIN has received 141 applications from across Canada.
“What I’m quite proud of for the team, is the speed with which we were able to launch calls for proposals,” says Lake. “And again, we’re learning from those, we’ve got room to improve. I think one of the stories that articulates the spirit of the organization, the culture that we’re developing, was our Innovation Booster, which is inherently designed to be much more at the speed of business. They’re really quick, they’re fairly small. People still sort of dropped their jaw when we say we’re turning them around in 40 days – that’s unusual in most grant programs.”
“But I’d say that’s probably a common theme for almost everything we’ve been moving forward, it’s pretty rapid,” adds Lake, “you know, more people, more attention, we’re growing quicker. And we’re getting that feedback. Generally, people don’t seek us out to tell us bad things. I’m sure there are people that don’t like what we’re doing, and I’d be curious to hear that and more importantly why? But the ones that are coming to us are generally celebrating going, ‘Hey, we didn’t quite have a home, or we didn’t know where to turn, or this is more of the kind of group that we’re looking for, or this is needed.’ So, it does seem like we’re hitting the right buttons for a lot of people.”
#Funding
#Innovation
#foodinnovationchallenge
#innovationbooster
#FoodTechNext