3 Shifts Creating the Future of Food Tech
The Mixing Bowl curated yet another incredible event, bringing together venture capital, foundations, founders, and experts who are creating the future of food. At this years’ FoodIT Summit, the goal was to deepen collaboration and look at potential solutions of new technologies.
It was a lively event, that had pitches from entrepreneurs, to panels that focused on what incumbent organizations are doing to sustain our food system. Ultimately, this summit provide the place for convergence, and what we can do to provide the platform-level change in the food system to create a more verdant world.
Three possibilities struck me as having the potential to radically change how we think about the future of food.
At this point, everyone in tech knows about IoT, big data, and sensors, yet we still have an incredible journey ahead to discover ways to use these technologies to shift how we understand the development of arable land and wilderness well-being. The Internet of Soil, is a concept that poses the important question, “How do we establish the operating protocols to track, share, and connect, the immense volumes of data that farmers, NGOs, and governments are creating, and collecting, about soil and wilderness health.”
Soil health is like the microbial health of humans’; it is the deciding factor of well-being.
The outcome could be immense. By creating an open-data protocol for the Internet of Soil, we can reframe how we understand the use of farmland, cattle ranches, and wilderness. Reshaping the value-creation process for farmers and land use, will define how we can increase yield and maximize the potential of arable soil for the coming generations.
2. Waste Stream and the Supply Chain
The numbers on food waste are staggering, and it is the celebrity food challenge of the moment for good reason. Food waste plagues the entire food supply chain, which means there is a lot of innovation potential, starting from the fields, all the way up to the produce shelves. The idea here, is to support farmers in getting more goods to market and leveraging light-weight connected solutions to track spoilage.
To me, when you start talking about the supply chain you are also talking about sourcing closer to cities, which reduces the food-miles and increase the longevity of produce. Which has the potential to be made more relevant by vertical farming. Most of the innovations in waste and the supply chain are going to be for high value crops, and highly perishable items first.
3. The Ontology of Food.
This is one of the most exciting and interesting challenges in food and agriculture. Matthew Lange, at UC Davis, posits that by creating an ontology of food from seed to plate, we can develop a cohesive understanding of how planet growth, nutrient density, and human health inter-relate in order to guide healthful food decisions.
This is an extremely complex task, and will revolutionize how we understand the relationship we have with food, because it can allow us to better understand how a whole spectrum of foods can improve diet and define healthfulness, ultimately reshaping how we discuss the impact that food has on human health and well-being.
As we move forward, the impact of these three possibilities to change food will become the platforms to drive further investment in capital and human ingenuity the future of food.
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