Animal nutrition and aquafeed company Nutreco is seeking applications for its latest Feed&Food Tech Challenge. The competition is centered around a singular question: “What is your breakthrough innovation – that cannot wait?” Click here to apply.
This year, Nutreco is extending the invitation to startups that are active in the food space with a special interest in the alternative protein sector in the following three capacities:
- Plant-based proteins
- Fermentation-based production of food (and feed) ingredients involving yeast, bacteria or fungi
- Cellular agriculture, including cell-based meat and seafood, dairy or eggs, and technologies enabling cell ag production processes
“I think Nutreco’s recent moves into alternative food proteins are very exciting examples of how technology development can be accelerated through partnerships,” David Welch, director of science and technology at The Good Food Institute and competition juror, said in a statement announcing the competition. “The Feed and Food Tech Challenge is a great platform for startups in this space to showcase their technology and explore opportunities to work with Nutreco.”
Other areas of interest include:
- Sustainable farming: This includes alternative feed ingredients and additives that can reduce dependency on scarce raw materials, feed ingredients, additives, and equipment to reduce environmental impact, and alternative farming systems that promote welfare or reduce environmental output.
- Health and welfare: This includes tools to improve overall animal health while helping them grow in a healthy way and preventing disease, rapid diagnostic methods to detect farm-level issues, pathogens, and toxins in feed, and young animal nutrition to help animals start on the right track.
- Digital and precision farming: This includes tools to enable continuous monitoring or data gathering around welfare, health, environment, feed quality and production as well as optimizing feeding, health, environmental controls, and production planning.
Fifteen finalists will be selected to attend a three-day final event on May 11-13 in The Netherlands where an international jury of industry experts will select the winner. The lucky company will also pitch at the fifth edition of F&A Next, a European platform event for investors and startups in the agrifood sector.
The competition invites you to comment, question, help the applicants enrich their ideas. Twenty votes are required in order for someone to move onto the next round and only Nutreco, Trouw Nutrition, and Skretting employees can vote. You can add your input here.
“The NFTC was Cytophage’s first experience in presenting our idea, synthetic bacteriophage, to a global audience. Winning the Challenge gave us external confirmation in the value of our innovation both scientifically and economically,” said Dr. Steven Theriault, CEO of NFTC 2018’s winning company Cytophage Technologies. “This instant credibility was an incredible advantage in attracting investors and partners to our company over the past two years.”
Nutreco is an active player in the agrifood innovation space, investing in startups with breakthrough innovations through its investment arm NuFrontiers. It recently backed cultured meat startup Mosa Meat, cell-based seafood startup BlueNalu, and recirculating aquaculture systems developer Kingfish Zeeland.
