Food Solutions

These are our 2023 challenges:

• Develop tastes: Developing new product concepts for better taste.
• Develop healthy food: Developing new products for a healthier lives challenge.
• Reinvent specialities: Re-inventing local food specialities for a circular economy challenge.

Food Solutions takes real-world sustainability challenges faced by the food industry and supports multi-disciplinary teams to find innovative new solutions with the potential to transform the food system.

Mentoring by industry experts and teaching delivered by our academic partners equips teams with the specialist knowledge they need to tackle their challenge. This is paired with a thorough course on innovation and entrepreneurship, led by world experts, to take students through their entrepreneurial journey from scoping out a potential market to pitching their final concept to industry at the end of the programme.

Teams from previous Food Solutions cohorts have gone on to establish their solution as a start-up venture!

Would you like to know more about Food Solutions? Are you interested in getting involved? Get in touch with us at food.solutions@eitfood.eu.

"I [learned] a lot in [taking] part in the program and the insights I gained help me a lot in finding orientation for what I want to do in the future. Thank you!"

"Brilliant experience all round. Opened up [the] opportunity to collaborate with other faculties and local business as well as further afield.”

"Combining theoretical interests with the challenges a startup has to face was a very interesting and fun experience"

"For me, EIT Food Solutions was a great chance to learn about the challenges in building up a business (e.g. planning, milestones, partners)."

“Thank you for offering this opportunity to us and giving all the effort to find interesting talks and [representatives] from the food industry!”

"[Food Solutions] made me realize how many challenges have to be faced from a first product idea to having a prototype"

“I really like this project and hope that students from many other universities also have the chance to participate”

1. Analyse the food system and identify a problem that can be addressed by a sustainable solution
2. Collaborate with a multi-disciplinary team and mobilise resources to develop a solution to a food system problem
3. Evaluate a target market and competitors in order to assess the commercial potential for a product innovation
4. Critically assess alternative product concepts to craft and communicate a sustainable value proposition
5. Iteratively design a prototype using MVP (minimum viable product) principles
6. Adopt technologies and techniques to deliver an innovative product and viable business case