New Wave Biotech and Nurasa explore how food tech can innovate like software

New whitepaper outlines how Lean Startup principles can accelerate food tech innovation

Singapore & London – 24 April 2025 – What happens when you apply Silicon Valley’s Lean Startup methodology to biomanufactured novel ingredients?

A new whitepaper from New Wave Biotech and Nurasa, The Lean Startup Meets Food Tech: Does It Work? explores how Lean Startup thinking - originally designed for fast-moving software companies - can be adapted to help food tech innovators build smarter, scale faster, and reduce risk in the journey from lab to market.

The paper draws on insights from across the food tech ecosystem, featuring voices from leading investors, founders, corporates and scientists such as Givaudan, Tetra Pak, Nucleus Capital, CJ CheilJedang, AAK and startups including Liven, MeliBio and DeNovo. It offers practical guidance on applying lean principles to navigate technical uncertainty, manage capital constraints, and align innovation efforts with market realities.

“Speed alone doesn’t win in food tech - rapid, structured learning across commercial and technical areas does,” said Zoe Law, CEO and Co-Founder of New Wave Biotech. “This paper is about helping teams move faster and smarter by focusing on what really matters at each stage of development.”

“Too often, innovators get stuck - not because the science doesn’t work, but because they don’t have the support to scale, navigate regulatory hurdles, or find market fit,” said Sukhi Wei, Strategic Project Manager at Nurasa and co-author of the paper. “This whitepaper is a practical guide to overcoming that.”

The whitepaper comes at a critical time, as more biomanufacturing technologies move from the lab toward real-world production. Investors and partners are asking tougher questions — not just about the science, but about cost, speed, and market fit. For many companies, knowing what to test, who to work with, and when to scale can be the difference between moving forward and getting stuck.

Applying Lean Startup Principles in a High-Stakes Industry

The report reinterprets Eric Ries's five Lean Startup principles originally written for software companies, and rewrites the rules for food tech and biomanufacturing, and distills how food tech teams can apply them: 

• Be strategic on where you buy, build and partner. Identify your focus and unique advantage, and bring in partners to close the gaps.

• Validate desirability, feasibility, and viability together instead of testing these separately— while juggling the interdependencies between them.

• Align technical progress with real customer demand from day one,. dDon’t wait until you're scaling to find your market and use techno-economic analysis to align technical and commercial progress.

• Maximize learning where it matters most. Focus your time and money on testing what’s most critical to building a scalable, sustainable business — and use clear metrics to guide every decision.

• Fail cheaply with scaled down tests, partnerships and digital tools to pin an expensive environment

Drawing on real life experiences across the industry, , the paper offers a practical guide of how food innovators can balance ambition with realism.

Download the Whitepaper

👉 The Lean Startup Meets Food Tech: Does It Work?

-ENDS-

About New Wave Biotech

New Wave Biotech’s  AI-powered platform simulates and optimises bioprocesses for output, cost and sustainability, enabling customers to foresee the scalability of their processes and reach commercial viability quicker and cheaper with less experiments. By doing this, they aim to unlock the power of biomanufacturing for the sustainable transformation of global supply chains. For more information, contact hello@newwavebiotech.com.

About Nurasa

Nurasa is a wholly owned subsidiary of Temasek - supporting the commercialisation of sustainable nutrition ingredients, offering ingredient innovators access to go-to-market program, regulatory guidance, product development support, and fermentation scale-up via its food-grade CDMO, ScaleUp Bio. For more information, hello@nurasa.com