EIT Food, an arm of the European Innovation and Technology Institute funded by the European Union and Blendhub, a Spain-based company that created a platform to offer any food recipe containing powder-based food ingredients anywhere in the world, are organizing an innovation challenge to help more people in Europe have access to safe, nutritious and sustainable food.
Innovating all along the food supply chain – finding new raw material sources, developing alternative nutritious solutions, and achieving more sustainable and cost-effective processes – is not an easy task. New food companies encounter barriers such as market segmentation, high development costs, lack of data to ensure success and efficient supply chains, and achieving better mass-market food quality. The idea is to help professionals and food companies speed up the time it takes to ideate, test, and launch a new product onto the market and deliver more nutritious, healthier, and affordable food products to consumers.
Blendhub, a member of The World Economic Forum’s New Champions community, is a global food production platform and multi-localized network that allows any farmer, startup or scale-up, to launch their novel food product, says CEO Henrik Stamm Kristensen. “Think of it as food-as-a-service.”
What Blendhub calls food-as-a-service is any food product recipe containing powder-based food ingredients, ideated and delivered anywhere in the world from sustainable global supply chains. The company wants to empower entrepreneurship and create local value instead of farmers and SMEs just exporting typical low cost food commodities like coffee, cocoa, spices, flour and many more to the Western world where all the value addition has been made over the last 100 years, says Kristensen. Some 80% of the world’s food is produced by 500 million farmers along with startups and SMEs but they reap only 20% of the value, he says.
Blendhub’s collaborative platform model for food production services aims to change that equation by helping companies and brands to develop and launch products, tackle new markets, and innovate without the need for investment in their infrastructure, says Kristensen. Its services comprise design and production and a range of additional services for brands and raw material providers.
Innovators have until June 15 to submit their applications. Solutions submitted must be able to be formulated in powder. Accepted categories include:
A new powder-based recipe or a significant improvement to an existing recipe with improved nutritional value, texture, flavor, mouth feel or cost.
- An innovative (potentially underutilized) powder-based ingredient to be utilized in a final product recipe or formula.
- An improved powder-based recipe that allows for targeting new markets.
Up to ten winners will receive services worth €25,000 to go from ‘idea to market’.
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