"If you're an entrepreneur and don’t know what you’re doing, you might spin around in circles for a couple years and then give up once your money runs out. We try to make sure that doesn't happen."
– Julie Mann, Executive Director, North Carolina Food Innovation Lab
Discretionary Grant - Kannapalis, NC (May 2026) — There is a moment, somewhere between making a protein bar by hand and realizing you have no idea how to get it on a shelf at Whole Foods, when the dream of a food product meets the reality of making one. For most first-time entrepreneurs, that gap is enormous, and largely invisible until you're standing in it.
The North Carolina Food Innovation Lab (NCFIL) was built to close that gap. Operating out of an 18,000-square-foot research and development facility at North Carolina (NC) State University — the nation's only facility of its kind dedicated to plant-based food innovation — NCFIL works with entrepreneurs, scientists and industry partners to help turn great plant-based food ideas into products that actually make it to market. With support from the Walters Family Foundation, the lab launched a new initiative: a two-day Food Entrepreneur Bootcamp designed to give early-stage founders the knowledge, hands-on experience and network to take their next step.
The need is real. North Carolina’s diverse agricultural economy and growing food tech ecosystem have created opportunity, but the state has lacked a program specifically tailored to food entrepreneurs’ critical needs. The bootcamp was designed to meet that need. It takes participants from consumer trends and brand building all the way through formulation, food safety, shelf-life testing and scaling up, in just two days.
The first bootcamp brought together roughly 19 participants - from farmers trying to add value to their products to small food company founders and early-stage entrepreneurs with ideas still taking shape. Attendees spent time in the lab itself, rolling out nutrition bars and formulating beverages, getting a feel for what it actually takes to develop a product from scratch. They also worked through food safety, processing, product testing and pitching — and heard from entrepreneurs who had already walked the same road and came back to share what they learned.
The participants arrived from different starting points. Some were navigating the leap to commercial production. Others were trying to understand why their formula wasn't stable, or how to find a co-manufacturer. Some were developing plant-based foods or functional beverages. What they shared was the feeling that the path forward was full of boxes to check and no map for checking them.
"There's a lot of people out there who think everyone's just making a product and putting it on shelves,” Mann says. “It doesn't work that way. But if they have the support system and the ecosystem around them, sometimes they get to the next big breakthrough.”
That is NCFIL's core conviction: that a great idea, given the right infrastructure and guidance, can become something real. The Walters Family Foundation's two-year grant will bring the bootcamp to a new group of entrepreneurs every six months, with a goal of reaching 80 to 100 people across North Carolina. For a lab whose engagement has already been linked to 1,400 new jobs and an estimated $500 million in investment statewide, it is one more way of putting those same resources within reach of someone who is just getting started.
For Mann, the measure of success isn't just whether a product makes it to market. It's whether the person behind it feels equipped to keep going. “We can't guarantee your product is going to hit and be a success,” she says. “What we can promise is we’ll help you get there, and help you figure out what to do next.”