By Sukhi Wei of Nurasa and Zoe Law of New Wave Biotech

New whitepaper outlines how Lean Startup principles can accelerate food tech innovation and scale-up

In a region as fragmented and fast-moving as Asia, could Lean Startup thinking offer biomanufactured ingredient innovators a more effective path to validation and scale?

A new whitepaper from Nurasa and New Wave Biotech, 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, especially fermentation-based companies, de-risk R&D, validate faster, and scale smarter. Singapore, with its integrated ecosystem for production scale-up, regulatory approval, and market testing, is highlighted as an environment where these principles can be applied effectively — and increasingly serves as a springboard for companies entering the broader Asia-Pacific region.

The paper features insights from across the food tech ecosystem, including voices from Givaudan, Tetra Pak, Nucleus Capital, CJ CheilJedang, and startups such as Liven, MeliBio, and DeNovo. It offers practical, real-world guidance for teams navigating product-market fit, scale-up, and capital constraints.

“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 validate market fit,” said Sukhi Wei, Strategic Project Manager at Nurasa and co-author of the paper. “This whitepaper is a practical guide to overcome just that.”

“Speed alone doesn’t win in food tech – structured learning 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.”

The whitepaper comes at a critical time. Biomanufacturing technologies are maturing beyond the lab, but their commercialisation remains slow and costly — especially in Asia, where market dynamics add an extra layer of complexity. The region’s food landscape is highly fragmented: over 60% of the packaged food market is controlled by local and regional players, with sharp variations in consumer taste, regulatory environments, and go-to-market routes. In this context, Lean Startup principles — with their emphasis on fast iteration, customer validation, and capital efficiency — are particularly useful.

“You can’t scale with a one-size-fits-all approach in Asia,” said Wei. “Ingredient companies need to localise early.”

Applying lean startup principles to ingredient innovation, a high-stakes industry

The report reinterprets Eric Ries’s five Lean Startup principles for the food tech and biomanufacturing sectors. It distills how teams working on new ingredients and product formulations can apply them effectively: 

• Be strategic on where you buy, build, and partner. Focus your efforts on what sets you apart, and collaborate to fill gaps.
• Validate desirability, feasibility, and viability together, rather than in isolation —— while managing the trade-offs between them.
• Align technical progress with real customer demand from day one. Don’t wait until production scale-up to test market fit.
• Maximize learning where it matters most. Focus time and budget on testing what’s most critical for a scalable, sustainable business — and use clear metrics at each stage.
• Fail “smart and cheap”. Use scaled-down pilots, partnerships, and digital tools to reduce cost and risk early.

From using AI-powered bioprocess modelling tools to leveraging CDMO infrastructure for pilot production, the paper showcases real-world examples of how food innovators can balance ambition with commercial reality. 

Download the whitepaper

👉 The Lean Startup Meets Food Tech: Does It Work?
nurasa.com/the-lean-startup-meets-food-tech-does-it-work/

About the authors

Sukhi Wei is the Strategic Project Manager at Nurasa, a wholly owned subsidiary of Temasek. Nurasa supports the commercialisation of sustainable nutrition ingredients, offering ingredient innovators access to go-to-market program, regulatory support, formulation, and fermentation scale-up via its food-grade CDMO, ScaleUp Bio.

Zoe Law is the CEO and Co-Founder of New Wave Biotech. New Wave Biotech unlocks the power of biomanufacturing for the sustainable transformation of global supply chains. Its purpose is to help biomanufacturing design smarter, commercialise quicker, and scale greener by providing bioprocessing foresight for innovation. 

For more info, contact: [email protected]