Tesco has committed £20m to Bramble Partners, the venture capital fund set up by Leon co-founder Henry Dimbleby, and agreed to act as its anchor partner as the fund seeks to back new innovations in Britain’s food system.
Bramble Partners, which launched in early 2024, targets companies with “ideas capable of creating real impact” on food, in areas including healthier eating, affordability and climate change.
The fund is targeting £100m of capital. It said its first close had attracted support from a number of business leaders, including Peter Harrison, the former chief executive of Schroders.
Under the deal with Britain’s biggest supermarket, some of the innovations backed by Bramble will be tested in Tesco’s supply chain.
The two organisations will also set up a joint innovation board to assess future opportunities.
Bramble’s first investment, announced earlier this year, was in a research and development start-up developing packaging that can improve the shelf life of berries, grapes and baked goods.
The fund is understood to be close to completing a second investment, in a health business, as soon as the end of this week.
Other investments under exploration include fertiliser businesses that use bacteria to pull nitrogen out of the air for crops rather than relying on fossil fuels. The fund is also looking at businesses that can detect gas coming out of food to better measure freshness and improve shelf life.
Writing in a joint opinion piece for The Times, Dimbleby and Ken Murphy, the chief executive of Tesco, said that “over the next ten years what Britain eats is likely to change faster than at any time in our combined working lives”.
They wrote: “Climate change, geopolitics, artificial intelligence and weight-loss drugs will reshape how food is produced and consumed. The businesses that innovate ahead of that disruption will be the ones that grow.”
Weight-loss drugs have already prompted changes elsewhere in the diet market. WeightWatchers last year launched a UK partnership with CheqUp to support patients using GLP-1 weight-loss medications such as Wegovy and Mounjaro.
Dimbleby is a former food tsar for the government. He led the National Food Strategy, an independent review of the food system for government. Addressing the Oxford Farming Conference while leading that review, he argued that healthy and environmentally sustainable food should be more widely and cheaply available.
He co-founded Bramble alongside Omar Habbal, Mark Hudson and Chris Mitchell.
Dimbleby said the deal with Tesco would “create something unique” in UK food investing.
“It’s about how do you make healthy, sustainable food mainstream rather than just being the preserve of people who have a lot of money,” he said.
