Why we invested in a rice company

Most people have heard that rice contains heavy metals. Most people don’t think about it twice — until they’re feeding an infant.

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Heavy metal contamination in baby food is not a new discovery. The U.S. congressional investigation in 2021 found detectable levels of arsenic, lead, and cadmium in products from major brands. Rice-based cereals were among the worst offenders. Rice absorbs heavy metals at a significantly higher rate than other grains. The science has been settled for years. What was missing was someone willing to engineer their way out of the problem at the production level.

The Problem Is Structural, Not Incidental

Contamination levels in baby food are largely a function of sourcing and processing decisions. Most manufacturers optimized for cost and shelf life. The heavy metal issue was treated as a regulatory compliance problem, not a product quality problem. That framing produces very different solutions.

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Duri Company reframed it as a supply chain problem. They source exclusively from certified organic Korean rice, which carries some of the lowest baseline arsenic levels in the world. Then they went further: a standardized washing and milling process that reduces heavy metal content by up to 74%. That number did not come from a lab study. It came from their own production line.

What Made the Decision Easy

I met Subin Heo, Duri’s founder, through our deal flow process. Her background is unconventional for a food startup — quantitative finance on Wall Street. What she brought to the table was a systems-level understanding of how to build a defensible product, not just a better label.

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The early signals were clear. Within two months of launch, Duri had sold out its entire U.S. export allocation. FDA certification was in place. English-language packaging was ready. B2B distribution infrastructure was already being built. This was not a team preparing to enter the U.S. market. This was a team already inside it.

Why the Market Opportunity Is Real

The North American baby food market is approximately $9 billion. The premium and organic segment has grown consistently. But the heavy metal safety category is essentially unoccupied. Parents who are actively avoiding rice-based cereals because of contamination concerns have no credible alternative that combines safety credentials with product quality. That is the gap Duri is filling.

The Bet

Safe food has permanent demand. In the infant category, safety outranks price. The parent who reads the congressional report on heavy metals in baby food does not go back to the old brand because it is cheaper.

Duri Company is building the category that should have existed a decade ago. We invested at seed because the team had already done what most teams only plan to do.

That is the only kind of early-stage bet worth making.

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*Ethan Cho is CIO and Partner at TheVentures, a Seoul-based early-stage venture firm. He writes about investment patterns at the intersection of Korean innovation and global markets.*