Feat Abroad: Food Hackathon in San Francisco
We landed in San Francisco last Thursday, October 27th. As always, it was a long flight, with plenty of excitement, and many great friends. We got into the Safe House around two o’clock in the afternoon, just in time to go shopping at the amazing Rainbow Market, put on some music and start cooking. Tim West, food hacker and entrepreneur, as always made me feel right at home and cooking was the perfect way to get to know everyone there. Polenta with cheese, brasato, paella, fresh salad. No better way to start an international an overseas adventure.
The next morning we kicked off the Food Hackathon. Tim West, together with Sara Roversi and United for Healthier Kids introduced the hackathon challenge: a global problem that we are deal with every single day. United for Healthier Kids is a region-wide movement to help parents raise healthier & happier kids. Supported by Nestlè, they aim to encourage healthy eating, drinking and lifestyle habits for children aged 4–12 years. They have identified four behaviors to ensure a healthier lifestyle: MORE Water, MORE Fruits & Vegetables, MORE Managed Portions and MORE Movement. Their vision matches perfectly with what I’ve been working on for the last year.
We gathered a great team and started hacking right away. With me, my very dear friend from Summer School Mediterraneo Melanie Weir; Luna, a designer based in SF; Jason, a Canadian coder currently based in the Bay Area; Ingi from Iceland; and Cindy, who I finally saw again after our first meeting at the hackathon in Milan Expo, Feeding Fair. Obviously we had with us the main the best and younger hackers of the event, Tommy and Micky, sons of Sara and Andrea and Future Food Hackers in training aged 9 and 11
Our plan has been to work through the concept of Feat.School: a platform for families where kids and parents work together and parents are supported in creating healthy lifestyles for their kids. We asked ourselves: what if parents could find ways to make exercise fun and participate with their kids?
With our solution kids and parents get coins for their physical activity, good sleep, and healthy eating. The data would be tracked by phones and/or wearables so all family members can contribute to a shared coin collection. The hope is to motivate children to make healthy choices, knowing that their behavior will be rewarded and they are contributing alongside their parents to a shared goal. Coins allow the family to get healthy food benefits (discounts on product, meals, food trips, cooking classes) placing healthy food as a reward and increasing the importance given to it: good food is the best prize you can get!
It was thrilling to see the other inventive ideas teams came up with. There was a big focus on AgTech, on creating tools that can be harnessed by food producers around the world. I noticed that food waste was also a common theme and ideas about how to decrease food waste were incorporated into many of the ideas. In addition, virtual and augmented reality are starting to play a prominent role in food tech solutions. The winning teams proposed ideas that touched on these themes, like processing organic waste to make treats out of food waste, or creating spaces to cultivate microgreens indoors not just for flavour and nutrition, but for understanding about how food is grown. The final winning team took tech to the next level and suggested a sort of Pokemon Go for healthy food education. I loved seeing the enthusiasm and creativity from each team!
Unfortunately, we didn’t win the hackathon but we really brought to life something viable. We’ll continue with Feat.School, for real! We’ll launch a pilot in Turin in December, and we plan to follow up with other two cities in Italy. And so, why couldn’t we do that in CA?! Feat.Edu has been designed by kids for kids, totally human centred, which means having a greater possibility to be actually adopted by kids and parents.
