Ten European FoodTech companies have been awarded prizes in the Affordable Nutrition Scale-Up Challenge launched by EIT Food, an arm of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) and Blendhub, a global food production platform and multi-localized network that aims to help any farmer, startup or scale-up, launch their novel food product.
The competition challenged young companies to come up with innovative ingredients or food formulations that would promote healthy and sustainable diets in Europe. The idea behind the competition was 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.The selected companies come from Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Poland, Denmark and Israel in the fields of alternative proteins, plant-based ingredients and more sustainable food formulations to mitigate food waste,
“The challenge is not just an opportunity to accelerate innovation in the nutrition space, but also a pathway to improve food systems through cutting-edge innovations,” Adam M. Adamek, Director of Innovation at EIT Food, said in a statement.
By 2050, the United Nations reports the world’s population will have grown by 16%, which will require an increased food availability of 70%. Meanwhile 1.3 billion tonnes of food are wasted worldwide every year in our current food system. This loss is estimated at an annual global value of $1 trillion. It represents wastage of the water, land, energy and other natural resources used to produce or transform food, amounting to approximately 4.4 gigatonnes of preventable gas emissions every year.
One of the competition’s winners, a Krakow, Poland based company called Rebread, treats stale bread that would normally be thrown away as a valuable resource that can be turned into new breads and tasty snacks; probiotic drinks and breadbucha, umami seasoning and meat substitutes, vegan cosmetics, craft spirits; biodegradable packaging and biofilament for 3D printing.
Four other winners are developing new types of flour from waste: the Netherlands’ MaGie Creations and Denmark’s Circular Food Technology separately turn grain left over from beer making into super grain flour which is packed with nutrition and can be used as an ingredient in bread, pasta, and other baked goods. France’s Green Spot Technologies has developed a fermentation platform that uses side streams/ by-products of fruits, cereals, and vegetables to produce upcycled flours that offer nutritional improvement and fiber enrichment while Italy’s CircularFiber, addresses food waste generated by the agri-food industry by regenerating artichoke waste into nutritious vegetable flour.
The other winners of the competition are:
Denmarks’ Aliga, a company which specializes in the development and production of microalgae products for food, feed and dietary supplement applications,
The Netherlands’ Alver, a company developing high-protein products from the microalgue Golden Chlorella which can replace egg or chemical binders in food products and has emulsifying and gelling properties, which are ideal for alternative milk and yogurt products.
Portugal’s Landratech, which wants to scale up the production of bioactive-rich extracts from acorn-based coffee substitutes.
Israel’s Fabumin, a company that transforms legume cooking water (aquafaba) into a powder that can serve as a functional alternative to eggs for industrial applications. Just like eggs, Fabumin binds, foams, and emulsmifies, making it suitable for food products like cakes, cookies, pastries, crackers, spreads, sauces . The company says its powder also has applications for the cosmetics industry,cultured meat, and the microbiome industry.
Spain’s Keratin, which makes hydrolyzed, decolorized protein powder from livestock blood suitable for various food applications.
The awards ceremony took place in Blendhub’s Innovation and Co-creatio Center in Murcia, Spain.The recognized projects received services worth €25,000 helping them from idea through intelligent targeting to product market launch in any European country.
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