Health
The agrifood industry has created a double burden of malnutrition: 26% of the world’s population experiences hunger or lacks access to sufficient and nutritious food, while 39% is overweight or obese. While the volume of food produced globally is sufficient to feed everyone on the planet, nutrition and distribution challenges continuously exacerbate global health crises.
Portfolio companies addressing Health KPI
About Health
The agrifood industry needs to transition towards nutrition security instead of just food (and thus calorie) security. The food system has prioritized quantity over quality over the past 70 years, optimizing the entire supply chain to produce cheap calories. As a result, diets on a global scale are severely unbalanced, underdelivering amino acids, nutrients and fiber and leading to a steep increase of food-related health conditions such as high cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.
While hunger rates decreased in the first part of the 21st century, they have since increased rapidly and reached a historic peak. In parallel, no country has experienced a decrease in obesity since 1975 and 51% of the population is expected to be obese or overweight by 2035.
Addressing this paradox is not about producing more food – the world’s farmers already produce enough calories to feed 1.5 times the global population.The focus must be on ensuring a reliable supply of healthy food that is attractive, available and affordable for consumers is key to ensuring a transition that stands the test of time.
Our Focus
Investing upstream to tackle nutrition at the root and improve availability, affordability and accessibility of healthy food is a massive opportunity to improve quality of life and reduce environmental, social and economic costs of both hunger and obesity.
Agriculture is Medicine: Astanor supports sustainable agriculture practices to regenerate soil to improve nutritional quality of produce and support the economics of production of healthy, affordable, nutritious food in the long-term.
Food is Medicine: Astanor supports technology-driven solutions that support the development and distribution of nutritious and sustainable food products, equitable access to healthy food and new food solutions to improve nutrition of dietary options and reduce chronic disease.
We measure our companies’ impact creation based on the number of people reached and the impact of the solution on the consumers’ Disability Life Adjusted Years (DALY), an indicator evaluating the number of years lived disability and disease-free. A healthy diet will increase consumers’ DALY years by reducing the diseases linked to unhealthy diets.