Matt Beck
Valorize Bioscience (formerly Hoppy Planet Foods) – SEED Fall 2024
Published June 11, 2025
As part of our ‘Meet Our Founders’ series today, we introduce Matt Beck, Founder and CEO of Valorize Bioscience (formerly Hoppy Planet Foods) based in Charlotte, NC. Valorize Bioscience is reinventing downstream processing of insects to create dramatically improved ingredients, unlocking a sustainable future for the human and pet industries.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve and what influenced you to start your company?
A: We are creating a more sustainable food and ingredient system for the world, by unlocking new pathways to market for major insect ingredient producers. I have a deep personal passion for sustainability and removing the damage we’ve done/continue to do to the planet. I came to a point in my career where I felt that I could utilize my experiences to create a company that would make meaningful differences in food and sustainability, while also making profit, and deliver a triple bottom line.
Q: What are you most excited about right now? What keeps you up at night?
A: Many of the technologies that we need to create a sustainable world, and clean-up much of the damage we’ve done, already exist – this is extremely exciting! Equally as important, everyday there are more smart and motivated people turning their attention towards making technologies more efficient so that they can be deployed faster, and more widely (we place ourselves in this camp!). The speed at which we’ll make progress in bringing these solutions to market are largely contingent on access to financing and customers. Much of innovation in sustainability doesn’t look like a SaaS company and can’t necessarily be financed as such, and gatekeepers and policymakers need to prioritize future impacts in their decisions for how quickly they allow innovate technologies to come to market. We’ve continuously found that consumer interest in more sustainable options exists long before sustainable innovators are able to get products/services to them.
Q: What does the road ahead look like for your company?
A: We are leading the creation of a new segment in the rapidly growing insect industry, and so our aim is to showcase our expertise to major producers and establish ourselves as the pace setters for the new industry standard. We’ve got a lot of work to do in scaling up with partners and delivering against their various processing needs, so that will be our primary focus in the months ahead.
Q: When did you know you wanted to take an entrepreneurial path?
A: While I didn’t know it was defined as entrepreneurship, I’ve been on this path at different times for most of my life. As a teenager, my best friend and I started a snow shoveling business to make extra cash. In college when I was fed up with all the money I spent on textbooks, I created a textbook rental company (which went on to win a business competition in my school). After becoming frustrated with sitting in daily commuter traffic, I launched a micro-transit company. Each one of these taught me important lessons about opportunity costs, finance, operations, market expertise, and how to design a business that can create and capture value. I’ve leaned on these experiences to intentionally step onto the entrepreneurial path full-time with Valorize Bioscience (formerly Hoppy Planet Foods).
While visiting Charlotte, Matt recommends:
- Charlotte has an awesome outdoor activity culture combined with an incredible brewery scene. Head to the US National Whitewater Center for all kinds of activities or saddle up to a table at the Old Meck Biergarten.
Support Valorize Bioscience and Matt by:
- We sit in between major raw ingredient producers and major ingredient distributors/sellers. Any help in making connections with people in companies like ADM, Cargill, Buhler, and Louis Dreyfus would be incredibly helpful.
