Around Finnish Entrepreneur’s Day, Finnish Startup Community is highlighting Finnish startups and growth companies building solutions to some of society’s most important challenges.
Behind every company is a founder who saw a problem and decided to build a solution.
For Valerie Asunta of Rebl Eats, that problem is to change the way the world eats, to change what happens to it.
Sustainability as a secret mission
Shifting towards more plant-based food can make a significant difference. A 2025 study by researchers from the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) and the University of Helsinki compared diets with different sources of protein. The climate impact of a diet where 70% of protein came from plant sources was 39% lower than that of a diet where 70% came from animal sources.
Many people say they want to change the way they eat, but taste, convenience and habit still get in the way of better choices.
Rebl Eats wants to close that gap.
The company makes handmade, veggie ready meals for the modern consumer. But their approach is to lead with flavour and quality first, as sustainability is unfortunately not a top criteria of purchase today. They make tasty food that just happens to be more sustainable.
As Rebl puts it:
“Ready meals without compromises. Not from taste, health, nor sustainability.”
Its products are already available in around 1,500 supermarkets and through food delivery.
Changing what the default ready meal looks like
For Valerie, the ambition goes beyond selling more Rebl meals.
If Rebl succeeds, she wants the company to prove that veggie-led meals can become the new standard as the modern consumers’ everyday choice, to make a positive impact at scale.
As Valerie puts it:
“The planet doesn’t need more food, it needs better food.”
What needs to change in Finland?
Valerie believes Finland’s food industry needs more collaboration and transparency between brands, production companies and retailers.
In her view, the current system is too siloed, with too little information sharing, which triggers waste in each silo and ultimately higher consumer prices. So it’s a loose-loose-loose situation, in an already small market.
That is why Rebl Eats prones collaboration over competition, to grow the whole market together with other players who share the same values and are willing to challenge that mindset.
For Rebl Eats, we shouldn’t expect consumers to make sustainable choices but rather remove all barriers to make that choice the easiest and tastiest.
Entrepreneurs Build. Because Some Problems Are Too Important to Ignore.