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Giancarlo Addario

Giancarlo Addario

Operating Partner at Maia Ventures; food-tech investor and advisor with 30+ years in food innovation and R&D (21 years at Barilla before moving to VC).

Jun 25, 2026

3:20
What are you seeing right now in the startups?
3:23
so um there's so i think that the gf1 uh uh entrance in the market was a market catalyzer uh because uh the the what the the wellness uh trend was there since many years and would be there over other years whether we don't know whether the the the champion would be it would be a high I was going to say there, I think it's going to say there, I agree with you, Johan, but probably what was going on before the geopian era, it's going on at the faster pace.
4:04
So that's what that means.
4:08
In the supplement space, it's funny because Microbiome products, so prebiotic, postbiotic, everyone are trying to demonstrate that they have some kind of geocron effect.
4:24
If you see the protein products, protein drinks, they are starting to demonstrate that they have.
4:30
So everyone is running In Italy, we are soccer fans, so we say all the players are running after the same ball, which is not going to stay for longer because then we will have some kind of market normalization.
4:50
So we have this stronger tradition for now for certain kinds of categories.
7:13
So if you have a factory manufacturing cookies and the cash flow says, ah, not as good cash flow anymore, then your accountant will step in and say,
9:39
And just look at what happened.
9:41
[laughs] And, uh, all what he said didn't happen, so this, this means that what happens when you stop taking a drug is that you go back to the, your normal life and your normal habit.
9:54
So, uh, what, uh, GLP-1 doesn't do is, uh, uh, the, uh, shifting habits, shifting diets.
10:04
It doesn't do that, and we must be aware of that.
10:08
Uh, the second critical point is that when you take GLP-1, if you don't take that under a strict, uh, uh, physician surveillance, you don't take the right food and you can, uh, have a lack of protein.
10:25
You can lose your, uh, muscular muscle, uh, muscle tissue that then makes much more difficult to lose weight afterwards when you stop.
10:39
The third point is that, uh, what we observe on the market is that actually people is going away from, uh, uh, sugar drinks, is going away from snacks, and, uh, is trying to eat better.

18 MINS LATER

28:33
Yeah.

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