October 11, 2024
Future foods in safe hands
The pressure was on in the Inaugural Food Innovation Challenge, as students from UQ and QUT battled it out to turn F&B innovation projects into viable businesses.
From sustainably tackling malnutrition to providing cost savings for people with allergies, teams delivered a range of future food innovations, with five products created and sold to customers during the program.
Fourteen teams in the UQ Ventures Food Innovation Challenge were set the task of developing a product in one of four themes, identified by the FaBA Global Trends Report as necessary areas for future innovation:
- Personalise, functional and convenient foods
- Natural, healthier and nutritional diets
- Sustainable production and consumption
- Supply chain resilience.
Teams from food technology, commerce, engineering and IT identified a problem (or gap) in the market, developed a solution to address the need and validated the market for that product.
FaBA Training Centre Program Lead Associate Professor Nidhi Bansal said the program’s appeal was its ability to draw students together from diverse disciplines to solve problems.
“Our first Food Innovation Challenge was an outstanding success with such a broad cohort of students,” Associate Professor Bansal said.
There are now five products in development, which will have genuine impact within the broader F&B industry.
The winning projects shared in a $10,000 prize pool:
- Chirpe: Solving sustainability and protein intake using the power of cricket protein
- Bananza: Creating opportunities for marginalised communities to produce products for the world stage
- Bready: Sustainably tackling a malnutrition crisis in Australia’s aging population one pancake at a time
- Crop Cart: Putting the pressure on grocery stores and providing cost savings to people with allergies and intolerances.
- Pollinate: Giving time and power back to restaurateurs keeping the places we know and love open
Pollinate Founder Adeep Mitra said: “In just a few weeks we took the initiative to deep dive into the space and really understand what issues our customers faced.”
Across the seven-week program, students worked with mentors from across the food landscape – including venture capitalists and entrepreneurs – to develop their ideas.
Chris Haydon, Business Development Director, Lilly’s Little Lunchbox said it wasn’t just the students who benefitted from the experience.
“Mentoring is a two-way street of learning, growth, and inspiration,” he said.