Fermented and upcycled ingredients inventor receives acclaim from the European Commission 

15 February 2023

Dr Ninna Granucci is a scientist and CEO of Green Spot Technologies, which ferments and upcycles natural food byproducts from food processing industries to produce highly-nutritious ingredients. It’s a circular economy venture, which aims to help reduce the amount of plant-based product that is annually wasted, currently estimated at 32% by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation. Green Spot’s responsible technology makes use of product such as brewery spent grains, winery grapes marc and beverage apple pomace while generating only clean water as waste. The resulting flours are high fibre (including prebiotics), high protein, rich in minerals and clean label. 

Ninna’s journey as an entrepreneur began as an international student from Brazil, studying towards her PhD in Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland. She entered business planning competition the Velocity $100k Challenge, run through the Business School’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE), with her supervisor Associate Professor Silas Villas-Boas. With encouragement from mentors and judges, they continued to develop their venture after graduating from the Velocity programme, and they were soon wooed to move to Toulouse. They received $1.2 million from French angel investors, and an offer from the French government to match any investment up to €4 million in the form of a grants and repayable grants, among other numerous incentives.  

Since moving to France, Green Spot Technologies has worked with a core staff of around a dozen employees to perfect their technology. Over the last four years Green Spot Technologies has experimented with over 100 types of alternative by-products, of fruits, vegetables, legumes, herbs and cereals. Green Spot Technologies innovations have been acknowledged through numerous awards organisations including the New Zealand Innovation Awards, Grand Prix Inn’Ovations, French Tech Agri20 and the Kellogg Innovation Challenge.  

After a long development journey Green Spot Technologies has secured patents in multiple markets and are now ready for market entry. They are initially focused on producing a range of fermented ingredients based on apple, tomato and spent-grain flours (Ferment’Up flours) which will be sold through a business to business (B2B) model to commercial food manufacturers. 

Paving the way for deep-tech women founders 

Ninna’s scientific discoveries are not the only skills that she has had recognised. Her role as CEO of a tech company has received attention for its novelty at a time where the glaring lack of representation for women as founders has become unconscionable. Ninna was invited by the European Commission to be one of two women to represent France at the European Female Founders Summit in Sofia (Bulgaria) in 2022, and received an EU Prize for Women Innovators 2022 in Brussels.  

Women account for only 1 in 7 of Europe’s entrepreneurs and receive less than 2% of venture capital funding. This last statistic is particularly problematic to Ninna who says “All the other kinds of problems tend to solve themselves if you have funding.” She speculates that “Investors often seem to prefer to do business with those with traditionally masculine traits. I don’t come across as aggressive and I tend to smile during meetings and sometimes that is seen as weakness by some investors. On the other side, it was a very empowering experience to receive a female founders award and it’s nice to see a supportive community forming.”    

Ninna is now part of the European Female Founders network, which aims to increase representation and support for women founders. Their ambitions include advocating for the needs of women founders through workshops and developing funding networks. They also aim to empower the next generation of women entrepreneurs through education and encouragement for young women and girls to showcase entrepreneurship as a viable career.   

When asked about passing on the wisdom that she has acquired, Ninna says her biggest lesson so far has been “You will always have a next big problem that will need a big solution. It’s not enough to have one good idea, you have to have many good ideas and work hard to transform them into solutions on the path to taking something from the lab to market. Going through Velocity, I learned that you have to be comfortable with the uncomfortable, and that still holds true.”