Investors enjoy having plenty of options, and the food tech landscape certainly offers choices at the moment with approximately 3,000 companies vying for funding and customers, according to two prominent food tech investors. The explosion of new companies is fueling innovation in the field, but there are growing pains as well.

“The ecosystem has changed so much in terms of how you characterize or even think of the innovations that are shaping this space,” said Brita Rosenheim (pictured, left), partner of The Mixing Bowl LLC and of Better Food Ventures.

Rosenheim stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and answered questions from host Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) during this year’s FOOD IT: Fork to Farm event in Mountain View, California. She was joined on the set by Seana Day (pictured, right), partner of The Mixing Bowl and of Better Food Ventures, and they discussed their investment picture, food delivery services and data challenges facing growers. (* Disclosure below.)

Better Food Ventures makes early stage seed investments and has funded 12 companies to date. Its portfolio includes one company that provides real-time, in-field weather data and another that offers a cloud-based nitrogen application recommendation engine. Seven of the startups have stepped up to price equity rounds, according to Rosenheim,

One dynamic that both investors have seen is consumer interest in food delivery services and online cooking video content like Tasty on BuzzFeed. “I think BuzzFeed took the traditional food media category by surprise. It’s kind of the bite-sized version of the Food Network,” Rosenheim said.

Scale is the issue for food delivery services

Rosenheim also expressed confidence in the food delivery model, although she cautioned that issues of temperature, speed and manual labor are proving to be a challenge for startup companies in the space.

“There still is an opportunity there. It’s about getting to the right scale,” she stated.

There has also been an increase in the use of technology by growers, but this has been hampered by a lack of effective support tools to channel the avalanche of data.

“We went from having no data to having more data than you know what to do with,” said Day, who pointed out that the information often remains in silos. “We really need to figure out how to integrate those data sources better.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the FOOD IT: Fork to Farm event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for FOOD IT: Fork to Farm. Neither Western Digital Corp., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE