After 12 weeks of coaching sessions, pitching practice, and expert insights, the main part of Singapore Food Bowl — the food sustainability accelerator program run by GROW — has come to a close.
Now it’s time for Demo Day – the chance for the 12 startups that have successfully completed our program to showcase their tech and business plans to an audience of investors, corporates, government agencies, and potential customers.
Singapore Food Bowl Demo Day will take place on Wednesday 14 October, 5 pm–7 pm Singapore/China time (11 am–1 pm CET; 5 am–7 am EST.) To attend, sign up here.
GROW — the agrifoodtech impact fund and accelerator backed by AgFunder — launched Singapore Food Bowl back in May with the support of Enterprise Singapore and Dole Packaged Foods. Other partners and subject matter experts to come on board included Singapore’s Economic Development Board; the UN Development Program’s Global Center for Technology, Innovation & Sustainable Development; Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology & Research; Food Industry Asia; Beanstalk; C-SAW; Padang & Co; IPI Singapore; and Mondelēz International.
Our objective with Singapore Food Bowl was to bring industry and startups together to help build a more resilient, sustainable, and decentralized agrifood system.
At front of mind was Singapore’s ’30 by 30′ policy agenda: the city-state’s aim to produce at least 30% of its nutritional needs domestically by 2030 — up from less than 10% today — while also strengthening and securing its external food sources.
Simultaneously, the chaos wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic served to bring the need for more resilient and decentralized food production into sharper focus.
Lockdowns and movement restrictions meant that, in many parts of the world, workers couldn’t get to farms or factories to harvest and process food. Internal and cross-border trade slowed considerably, leading to food shortages and panic buying.
Moreover, the assumed zoonotic origin of the coronavirus has made people think twice about the provenance of their food, with consumer interest in sustainably farmed and sourced animal products, as well as ‘animal-free’ alternatives, greater than ever before.
If you’re an accredited investor who wants to join AgFunder in building a more sustainable food future, find out more about investing in the GROW Impact Fund here
Covid-19 has not only shaped the theming, but the running of Singapore Food Bowl itself; due to movement and travel restrictions, the program was conducted entirely online.
That will also be the case for the program’s final phase: Demo Day.
Handpicked by the GROW team from the nearly 100 that applied from across the Asia-Pacific region, the 12 teams that have made it through our program have developed innovative solutions in areas such as urban farming, alternative protein production, food waste valorization, supply chain efficiency, and more – fitting hand-in-glove with the ’30 by 30′ national food story.
The 12 are:
- Augmentus (Singapore)
- CocoPallet (Philippines)
- Crust (Singapore)
- DiMuto (Singapore)
- Fortuna Cools (Philippines)
- InvertiGro (Australia)
- ListenField (Thailand)
- Lleaf (Australia)
- Mi Terro (China)
- OTH (Australia)
- SingCell (Singapore)
- Smoocht (Singapore)
You can read more from AFN on each of the startups here, here, and here.
While it won’t be the usual pitching event with teams up on stage, a silver lining of it being completely virtual is that we wont be trammeled by the usual restrictions on attendee numbers – so all of you can sign up to join us on the day!
