Venner Nutrition

As a social impact enthusiast, I believe that healthy, nutritious food belongs to everyone - not only those who can afford it. I co-founded a social impact startup - Venner - that enables me to combine my previous experience with my passion. With our amazing team we've been able to create significant impact among food insecure families. 

I'm a MSc Food, a health coach and have extensive experience in retail, import, food brands, sales, category management and influencer marketing. I have co-authored cookbooks and a have vast experience in vegetarian meal planning, recipe developing and food concept designing. Before Venner, my passion project, I used to curate a popular food blog. 

When it comes to nutrition we are unequal, even in developed countries. Our concept, combining nutrition, education and inspiration is a proven game changer with lasting impact. 

Venner aims to solve a global epidemic. Poor nutrition often goes hand in hand with poverty, which is increasing, as well as polarization of wellbeing. Bad diets kill more people globally than tobacco, and has a negative effect on our physical, mental and emotional wellbeing. It's not expensive or difficult to cook healthy vegetarian food, but many people think it is. How do you eat better with limited recourses or skills?  

With our solution based on wellbeing theory we transform the victims of food poverty into active change makers, by teaching them how to cook affordable, nutritious food, with new skills that ensure a long lasting impact. These positive changes thrive across multiple domains of their life.

Our solution connects people regardless of their SES (socioeconomical status), to be empowered and see themselves as valued members of society. 

Nutrition poor, often calorie rich diet affects millions globally every day. This deepens the polarization of wellbeing in society, and is extremely expensive, which can be seen in the growing public health costs. But when talking about poor nutrition, we must remember that the highest price is paid by the individuals; their health. In many studies low SES is linked to nutrition poor diets, failing health and sadly; earlier death.

In 2018 38.15 million people were living below the poverty line in the U.S. In Finland the poverty rate is 16%, and in UK they estimated to have 5 million poor children in 2020. In UK, over 11,500 children have hospitalized with malnutrition since 2015 and shockingly COVID-19 has doubled the problem.

Food bank reliance is growing. All interventions are necessary, but typical food aid does not often consider nutrition quality and fails to teach new skills to get out of the vicious circle of being dependent on aid.

That is what we want to change and elevate; food aid as an investment to public health and an effective resource to provide nutritional info and new vital, affordable healthy cooking skills. Our solution highlights that nutritious food belongs to everyone. 

Venner Nutrition is a social enterprise, that has been in operation Finland for two years. 

Our award winning innovation connects people of different SES, VIA our recipe platform, featuring nutritional info, cooking courses, recipe archives, celebrities cooking for a good cause, tips to reduce food waste and how to eat affordably and seasonally - all you need to start eating planet-friendly and affordable!

The cost is 9,90€/month for those who afford to pay for it - for low income families it's always free. Platform generated profits are directly used for Venner Nutrition food Boxes , sent free of charge for families in need.  In our model the ones who are able to pay for vegetarian food inspiration support the ones in need, thus increase the wellbeing in society.

Venner Nutrition Box is carefully planned vegetarian food box with fresh healthy ingredients. It comes with recipes and admission to the platform where the cooking course is presented. All the ingredients have their place in a healthy recipe, it is home delivered by our supermarket partner and always has vitamin D for boosting immunity. 

We have created a value chain for wellbeing that is tempting to join. 

We've been helping almost 10 000 families in Finland - providing healthy ingredients for over 400 000 home cooked meals, over 800 000 kg's of fresh fruits and impressive amount of immune fighting vitamin D. 

We co-operate with charities and NGO's, who ensure that our boxes are sent to homes where they are mostly needed. They are low income/poor families; customers of children social services, charities or shelter homes. 

To ensure this amount of help we've created a way of individuals, companies and foundations to join Venner together. 

The project was planned with a test group and is built on their experiences and needs. As we’ve noticed, utilising the food box is a significant opportunity for life-improvement

The impact: 82% learn new skills, 64% will add at least one of the healthy vegetarian recipes into their weekly food plan, 92% of the families who stated they did not take care of their diet, committed take better care of their diet now (for example increased the amount of veggies), 38% of the families who did not eat together now eat more as a family, 40% of the families who didn’t cook together now cook more as  family. (n 813 family units)

We believe everybody should have the right to enjoy the health benefits of nutrition-rich diet. Our solution, supporting the wellbeing theory of thriving across multiple domains of life, teaches how to cook healthy and cost-effective way and shows a way to take better nutritional care of the family. This creates more equal changes and makes people feel more connected in many ways. 

According to a study, young people with low or high SES associates healthy eating with privileged status and moral excellence. 

Our solution changes how people see themselves, empowers, boosts self-efficacy for those who are traditionally are left behind. 

Venner originates to my own experiences. I helped poor families directly with food aid as a volunteer. The food I bought for them was similar to the food I was cooking myself. The feedback was amazing. 

These families, and how they felt about receiving healthy food, opened my eyes to the inequality of nutrition. With affordable vegetarian ingredients and recipe tips I was helping them to learn new ways of cooking and to feel worthy members of the society! With healthy, cost-efficient food and new skills they felt empowered and elevated. They learned healthy nutrition was possible for them too, even they had thought it was something that was outside of their possibilities and not for them - a priority for those who were "better off". 

At that time I had my own meal planning and food box service that was not price sensitive. The feedback from my volunteer work, my experience in food business and passion to empower the unprivileged turned into the idea of Venner. My sister (who is a former social worker) understood how important this was. Together we decided to create a win-win way of helping the society's vulnerable, while you're inspired to eat better yourself. 

This is my passion; I believe empowering people starts from the plate. Nutritious food changes everything; how you feel, how healthy you are, how much energy you have, and also how you see and value yourself as a member of society. This has actually happened to me too! I was not struggling financially, but nutritionally. Eating healthier changed my life. These possibilities I want to create for everyone. 

Good nutrition, food, cooking and eating together is powerful, and yet often so unvalued as a starting point of better possibilities for life. When you have the tools to take nutritional care of yourself and your family, it empowers you in other areas of your life as well - this we've already seen in Finland!

There's a global (desperate) need of environmentally friendly cooking skills across society, and also to reach low SES families. We need people to feel connected, to feel valued part of the societies no matter how much they earn, and to be empowered. Our solution connects different parts of society and brings them together to eat affordable, planet-loving food. We're also not saying that everyone should go plant based - but everyone should have vegetarian cooking skills. 

I've studied food sciences, economics and marketing. My background is in food retail, influencer marketing. I've worked with many multi-national food brands, in several companies. I'm analytical, yet creative and smart meal planning is my passion - but only after I decided to start to take better care of my health and learned how to cook only after turning 30 myself! 

After that I've created multiple concepts around healthy food, co-authored cookbooks and co-operated with many multi-national and local brands and co-founded an influencer marketing agency. 

With Venner I combined my experience and ambition to create something innovative and impactful. But I don't do this alone! 

Our small effective team combines experience and passion in many levels. We are nutritionists, social psychologists, economists, and we have a digital developer in our team as well as amazing advisory team. This helps us to take our social innovation to other markets and allows us have even bigger impact. 

The feedback and impact deeply motivates us. Even thought the path of creating something new hasn't been easy, we know we have what it takes. 

Our solution is scalable, and it creates the systemic change needed: the previous passive objects (recipients of the food aid/surplus food/food waste) turn into active subjects (empowered by new cooking skills and capability to take care of their own health), and further into change makers (new skills supporting the wellbeing and the self image of the whole family creating "change makers" with new planet friendly cooking skills). 

Creating a new social innovation is endlessly exciting, but challenging. During these 2,5 years we've had success, but also setbacks. Here is an early day challenge. 

As we want all the earnings to go directly to the cause (nutrition boxes), we had challenges to find creative ways to finance this. We wanted to find a way where our work would come with no charge and didn't have funding so we needed to make this work from the day one. 

Our initial plan was to have a different margin split with our strategic partners but this simply wasn’t feasible. We had to find alternative ways to make the model financially sustainable, so we could afford to support the cost of the nutrition boxes for underprivileged families, and the online content, meal planning and support. Our new solution, born from an obstacle, allowed us to deliver on our model and mission, and allowed us to develop it even further. 

This is one example from our journey, of how an obstacle influenced our initial plan massively, but we managed to turn it into an opportunity. This allowed us to  strengthen our model and eventually created more value for more partners. 

Early in my career, in a big company was working for, I was offered a possibility to create a big category change pilot in the area that drove the demand and margin growth the most. Huge changes were driven across product groups that was not done without resistance. It took a lot, but with a pilot done I was able to create data and the change was possible - leading to margin growth in many categories. I've also worked as a team lead, and as a leader of category management team of franchise storekeepers, bringing new procedures to a new field from my past experiences. This developed my leading skills during the socially challenging and diverse situation, as change is never easy, but often indispensable. 

My experiences in work and life have developed my ability to lead and manage change with my motivational competence. These and our service dominant logic are needed when facing a structural change we are driving as a team. 

Also, we need to re-think about businesses and capitalism, and start to seek for a balance between how much resources are taken and how much given back. We are eager to show it's possible. 

We are a social enterprise with an authorized social enterprise mark, but consider ourself as a hybrid model since the profits of the platform are directly used for the boxes (the cost; 9,90/month/subscriber minus transaction fee), but we are sales driven and have multiple products. 

Our part of the Nutrition box is covered by our brand partners in exchange. In the platform we partner with food brands as content partners making us a social enterprise, profit-making but with restrictions. 

This way we create a hybrid for good; the marketing budgets of brands making this possible. 

We are an award winning social innovation (The most impactful act of Year 2019 by the coalition of social enterprises). We are actively working on a value chain of helping and empowering people with environmentally friendly, cost-effective food, where everyone involved benefits and learn new skills. We elevate food insecure families into active change makers by showing they can, too, have a choice when it comes to nutrition. Healthy, planet friendly food is not a luxury item that is only possible for some.

With the right skills and knowledge we can make it available for food insecure families too! The impact of this is massive. We empower people to see themselves worthy members of society, and offer them a choice to eat planet friendly food. We disrupt food insecurity by quite obvious, but yet not seen, way.

Those who subscribe to our platform or buy our other products learn new skills too, receive inspiration and are part of something bigger; they are driving the change for a nutritionally equal tomorrow. 

We' are actively developing our product offering to create even more value to the value chain; ie to fight food waste, to eat seasonal and to choose the planet-friendly options. With appropriate funding we can harness tech even more into the picture; we have plans for IoT, and AI to generate even more value and impact and transparency into our value chain. 

We elevate food culture, bring families back to the kitchen and support healthy eating environment for all.

We are a nutrition and education provider, but leave nobody behind. With our innovation solution anyone can help another to eat better just by eating better themselves. We connect people of the community together, to be inspired by the same, affordable, planet-friendly recipes and products. The poor family receives the Nutrition box free of charge (sponsored by individuals/local company sponsor/social services), and the sponsor can cook the same recipes from the platform, knowing exactly what the family she/he helped received, or order it for themselves as well! 

The sponsor can trust all the money goes to support the impact, and the family who needs help can trust the food is healthy and delivered for them with love. 

We are building a future that is nutritionally equal. With our solution we can show that healthy food is for everyone. This changes the self-experience of being a food aid object into valued subject with potential to learn and change.

Theory of change; Nutritional equality 

The families in need receives a well-planned Nutrition Box, home delivered, and access to to e-cooking class along with ongoing recipe inspiration and nutritional tools. 

The families cook together (we help to take the kids along!), learn new skills (82%), feel relieved (99%), eat more as a family (38%), and continue to cook the healthy recipes on weekly basis (64%). They commit to take better care of their health, by for example adding more veggies into their diet (92%). They learn how to use affordable, environmentally friendly ingredients, and many of them cooks vegetarian food for the first time. The vitamin D boosts immunity. All this creates energy and wellbeing that spreads into all areas of life.

The platform and the recipes from the box keep on inspiring the families, as they can explore healthier, yet affordable diet in the comfort of their own kitchen. Increased know-how in the kitchen boosts self esteem and quality time spent in kitchen and at the dinner table binds the family unit together in a lovely way. The food culture evolves, and the impact of childhood cooking will last for a lifetime. 

We've provided almost 10 000 boxes in Finland. About 20% of the families has received more than one, so we've been serving almost underprivileged 8000 family units of 2-6 people during our journey here; ingredients of one week's healthy food for approximately to 32 000 people (over 400 000 healthy home cooked meals). Finland's poverty rate is 16,4%, population 5,5 million. 

Our solution doesn't end when the recipes have been cooked. Our platform keeps inspiring these people weekly basis, and the impact of the new skills continue in everyday life. 

In UK we are looking to serve not just 10x higher (according to population) but even more, as our solution is more needed and charitable actions more common, but it's a safe estimation for the 1st year. In UK we're looking to a solution where a family would get the box 4x/year, so during the 1st year after launch we'd be serving about 80 000 people in UK, having even greater impact on their lives as the we can teach new skills and seasonal eating 4 times a year. 

(In total 110 000 including FI.)

In 5 years we're in US, and the amount of people we can serve has skyrocketed. In five years we will affect over 5 million people globally with direct help and food aid will be seen as an investment to health and better immunity.

Our solution serves also food secure who want to eat healthier and environmentally, but they aren't included in the numbers. 

We're just starting a pilot in UK. Our goal is to launch in UK during this Autumn, with local Venner's (ambassadors) cooking with us for the good cause, and with a local logistics partner. We're looking for a joint venture effort for the good of the ones who need help, and create a concept where the existing actors can include helping as an impactful way in their value chain. According to the negotiations we're positive we will find a great partner and our cause will benefit a lot of the existing customer base of the partner. We're not starting from a scratch with our impactful work, and are ready to start empowering people in UK - with our local partners. 

During the next five years we've scientific, proven evidence on the longer term impact of our solution - this work has started. This will benefit us getting further in great pace, as the existing solutions globally are lacking the long term impact. This will make us interesting for all the Western nations, who are looking to increase the wellbeing of the population and lower the public health costs in cost-efficient way.

Our solution is scalable, easy to localise as a social joint venture. With the right partners we truly have possibilities to affect the life and wellbeing of millions of people - while the planet benefits too. This is what the world desperately needs, and we're here to help. 

Our barriers are financial. There are solutions to all of the tech, logistical and all the other issues, but as we don't have yet funding for international growth we are constantly budgeting and finding creative ways to overcome obstacles. This all takes time and effort from the cause and impact we could create globally, and in that sense is not the smartest way forward. Our goals are big, involving high tech solutions that are cost-effective in the long run, but require investments in the beginning.  

We're too small team for such a big impact we've already achieved, and we know that we can do this globally too - with right tech possibilities. Our solution is creative, innovative and constantly evolving - and has massive potential on many levels. We've found a way to take many social barriers into account, and with the growing amount of feedback and impact data we evolve and develop our offering to meet the needs of the most vulnerable, as the ones who wish to help and eat better. 

Finances and finding funding is not always easy for a social cause, and how we success in this defines the pace we can go forward - and how impactful we will be. 

We're finding innovative and creative ways to be sustainable, but financing growth needs support. We do have a grant from government (de minimis support), and our advisory team is working actively to find the perfect way for us to go further in the complex world of social impact possibilities. 

We are negotiating with private impact investors, and we believe our journey will be a impactful combination of grants, funding from government and foundations, and private impact investors who are not after massive profits, but the impact. These are hard to find of course, but vital, and we want the match to be perfect. 

In Finland we are partnering with almost 100 corporate sponsors (Nokia, Salesforce, CGI to mention a few..), many children foundations and we also co-operated with municipalities during COVID19 lockdown. 

Our strategic partners are food e-commerce, food brands, vitamin brand,  and this co-operation makes this all sustainable for us. For commercial partners we are sustainability marketing partners, creating valuable content and also teaching tow target groups on how to use and cook from their products. 

We are also partnering with many of the biggest charities and shelter homes and children foundations, as our solution can be an "add on" to any existing support model. These partners ensure the Nutrition Boxes finds to the homes where they are most needed and we measure the impact together. 

Our innovation brings all of these different elements of society together - joining for a good cause for a better, healthier tomorrow value chain. We enable people from different SES to enjoy good cost-affordable recipes together, feel connected to the society, worthy members, as well as connected to their family as they cook and eat together - and learn new skills. We connect people to the nature showing that environmentally friendly diet is possible, and connect our strategic partners into doing good in a meaningful way - as part of their everyday business. 

In the long run we enhance the the public health, elevate societies and food culture and bring people back together - as a joint effort with our partners. 

Our business model is a mixture of philanthropic and commercial. The payments of the platform are directly used to Venner Nutrition Boxes sent to families in need (philanthropic) but the partnerships with food brands goes under social enterprise model, as well as our next product line. 

We combine different parts of the society into together and provide the food brands a meaningful way be part of something bigger. We offer innovative co-operation, content creation and ensure partner brand to be seen and used in the value chain in a meaningful way. 

We have a service model that has both platform driving impact in many ways, and an effective solution to provide planet friendly ingredients and cooking skills for all. We don't leave anybody out. There is growing need for vegetarian solutions (in UK 30% of the consumers are flexitarians already) and new sustainable ways to ensure the food aid given is impactful, transparent and empowering, and drives health, not sickness. 

Also COVID-19 makes us even more needed. Our solution is immunity boosting, and is, has always been, home delivered for the families in need of food aid, and our solution is ready to order for anyone for themselves as well. This part we're actively developing, to meet the needs of non-price sensitive customers and smaller family units (as singles and dingles). 

We act as any company would, but we're not only profit driven - we're impact driven, after more equal tomorrow, that starts from the plate. 

We have both private and corporate and foundation sponsors, who have seen the impact we can create in a cost-efficient and 100% transparent way. We always sell products, we don't take donations. All the product purchased contributes to the good cause, allowing us to reach also the people who are traditionally left behind from nutritional services. 

Our solution will be a combination of product sales, grants, raising impact investments. 

Our revenue streams already support us locally in Finland, but it's not feasible for growth in other markets. With this we need support, but our model has shown already that we are a sustainable solution that can fund itself eventually and is sustainable. 

We have 56 000 dollar grant from Business Finland (de minimis support) and 34 000 dollar dept that can be transferred to equity from a local impact angel investor. Our revenue was over 600 000 dollars during last 12 months. 

We are looking to find funding of 500 000 dollars ideally (that could be a mixture of different monetary elements; grants, impact funding etc). This would allow us to open two new markets with right strategic partners. Our team is super efficient and talented, but as we are just a couple of people working full time on the case, there isn't too much stretching left to do and in order for us to create a the amazing impact (we have proven to have) globally among millions of people. 

We will be self funded in each location in about one-two year/s, and easy to scale with right partners almost anywhere. 

At the moment our expenses are coming now from UK and FI, them being around 20 000 - 30 000 dollars / month in Autumn, this being before the launch and will grow as we are done with pilots. The are some moving parts as we don't yet have estimation for many vital activities in UK (filming, tech regarding UK platform), and we haven't taken Nutrition Box cost into account here as the money goes directly to buying boxes for the ones in need. 

We are a cost-effective conscious in all that we do, and it has helped us a lot, but it's not sustainable for growth in other markets. 

Our world is facing urgent and complex challenges. We believe that our solution makes healthy food more accessible to everyone taking in account the environmental and educational aspects. Our goal is to build a healthier and more equal future and impact many lives – but in order to do that we need support in the beginning of our journey. 

According to all the impact surveys and feedback we've received from the families we know for sure that our work can have a massive impact on the wellbeing of the families now, and the impact will be a long lasting one - the society benefiting in many ways of it. 

We are looking to find partners to join for the good cause for a long run. We bring our expertise on nutrition, meal - and recipe planning, the scalable concept, amazing empowering products, and we need someone to co-create and drive the impact even further. Our concept is impressive, and with right support the impact can be massive on many wellbeing areas. 

We need local and global food brands from each of the markets, we need Venners - celebrity ambassador's who are willing to cook for a good cause, we need supply chain partners as a joint venture model and corporate partners joining the change with us with their CSR strategy. 

For mentors we need people who believe in the power of right nutrition and understand the complexity of food scarcity. They should be impact driven and well connected to help us with our partnership goals, this is vital for us.