In October 2021, the EIC Fund awarded a €1 million grant to SwissDeCode, a Swiss start-up providing rapid, on-site food testing solutions.
The EIC Fund invested €1 million for equity in the Lausanne-based start-up SwissDeCode, following a grant of €2.5 million. SwissDeCode’s innovations help companies in the food supply chain to detect food contamination and adulteration early enough. The company is embedded in the Swiss as well as in the European innovation ecosystem, not only collaborating with InnoVaud and Innosuisse, but also with the European Institute of Technology (EIT) and the European Innovation Council (EIC). SwissCore had the opportunity to talk to Brij Sahi, CEO and co-founder of SwissDeCode.
SwissDeCode was founded in 2016 after co-founder Gianpaolo Rando received the patent for the food analysis technology developed during his successful research project at the University of Geneva. SwissDeCode’s success set out from there. Shortly after its launch, in 2018, SwissDeCode became a member of the EIT Food Knowledge and Innovation Community’s (KIC) “Rising Food Stars”, and has been considered one of the top 100 start-ups in Switzerland for three consecutive years since 2019. In 2020, the EIC Accelerator supported SwissDeCode in developing an automated food certification platform. Furthermore, SwissDeCode was also awarded a COVID-19 fund by the Swiss government to develop a technology that can be used in COVID-19 environmental testing. After receiving funding from the Swiss government, InnoVaud, Innosuisse, Horizon 2020, EIT Food and the EIC Accelerator, the company was and still is scaling up its business activities. SwissDeCode has been involved in several projects within the EIT Food and collaborated with companies based in Spain, Italy or the Netherlands, who have benefitted from SwissDeCode’s technology, expertise and their knowledge of the food industry.
SwissDeCode represents a success story not only for its number of supporters. It is remarkable that SwissDeCode’s impact reaches from Switzerland to Europe and beyond. Only recently, in collaboration with Mars Wrigley, they have developed an on-site test to quickly detect Cocoa Swollen Shoot Disease (CSSD) in asymptomatic trees (see SwissDeCode article). This innovation is a major breakthrough for the cocoa and chocolate industry, not only in Europe but also in West Africa.
Today, 70% of the world’s chocolate is sourced in the West Coast of Africa, the Ivory Coast and Ghana. Since its first detection in 1940, the CSSD virus destroys around 10% of the cocoa crops every year. 14 million families in the West Coast of Africa rely upon the chocolate industry. Thus, the virus not only often results in deforestation, since farmers have to clear land to grow new chocolate plants, but also threatens the livelihoods of the farmers and their families. After years of looking for a cure and measures of prevention for the virus, SwissDeCode could develop a rapid on-site DNA test to detect CSSD. With the help of this test, the affected farmers can now prevent the disease from spreading and the cocoa yield from being destroyed. “The European Union is the world’s largest chocolate exporter, so you can imagine the industry that is supported by our rapid on-site test. In Switzerland, numerous businesses are active in the chocolate industry. Barry Callebaut, for example, who employs thousands of people, is the largest grower of chocolate in the Ivory Coast”, SwissDeCode co-founder Brij Sahj stated in an interview with SwissCore.
The European innovation institutions have supported SwissDeCode in scaling up their activities in several ways. A start-up needs to find funding that will support its journey through its phases of maturity, where Swiss and European funding complement each other. “In the past, investors were quite happy to pay for pilots. What we are noticing today is that when we seek venture capital, many private investors would like to see the pilots already completed”, Brij Sahi states. This is where funding schemes like Horizon 2020 are beneficial to start-ups. Secondly, the COVID pandemic threatened to bring all of SwissDeCode’s commercial projects to a standstill. The company was in danger of slipping into the “valley of death” where many start-ups fail. However, with the EIC funding and the funding provided by the Swiss government, SwissDeCode could develop COVID-19 solutions geared towards the food industry. Importantly, the European funding programmes have also provided SwissDeCode with a European network of customers. “Horizon 2020 brought together large corporations and start-ups on a level playing field”, Brij Sahi states, “In Switzerland, it is a great opportunity for a start-up to have companies like Nestlé or Barry Callebaut sitting across the table to pitch to them. In the European Union, we gained access to players like PepsiCo or Unilever, which were open to our ideas as well.”
Now, after their recent achievement of receiving an EIC investment worth €1 million, SwissDeCode is gaining an EIC board member who is to be appointed by the EIC. The EIT Food already has an observer on SwissDeCode’s board. SwissDeCode’s next steps will be to complete two pilots by the end of this year and to further commercialise their innovations in areas of the food industry such as dairy, grains, coffee and chocolate.