Food Solutions
Food Solutions brings together multi-disciplinary teams to tackle real-life industry challenges and develop innovative new solutions for the food system
Applications for 2025 programmes will open soon!
These are our 2025 Food Solutions challenges:
- Sip by Sip: Creating healthy, sustainable, and minimally processed ready-to-drink products.
- Full Protein: Bringing alternative protein solutions to young generations.
- Circular Young: Reducing food waste from purchase to disposal for a more sustainable food ecosystem.
- Waste-To-Value: Using upcycled agricultural and food waste to contribute to the circular economy.
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 (University of Reading, Technion, Warsaw University, and EIT Food) equips teams with the specialist knowledge they need to tackle their challenge.
This is paired with a thorough online 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!
In 2024, over 170 Food Solutions students worked to tackle the following industry challenges:
- EcoBite Delights: Adding diversity to bakery and patisserie goods for a more inclusive food system.
- Pea-licious: Developing veggie protein delights for healthier children challenge.
- ZeroWaste Design: Reducing food and packaging waste for a sustainable supply chain challenge.
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.
Testimonial from Federica Galli, Health & Well-Being R&D Manager at Puratos
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You will never know how capable you are of innovation until you take the first step. And in our case it was stepping to take part in EIT Foods with mentors helpings us to navigate in the right direction.
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I gained knowledge on subjects that I wasn’t familiar with, like economy and finance. Plus, you deal with people from different backgrounds - food scientists, chemists, engineers, ... - which was very enriching. At the same time, we needed to be able to explain our concept to a non-technical, more business-oriented audience.
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BanaBooms creators Ines Kutzli and Inna Zhuravlova took part in our Food Solutions 2018, where they developed a breakfast cereal made from surplus bananas to reduce food waste.
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Holiroots rescue veggies that do not pass the farmer's gate and turn them into healthy and yummy vegetable crackers! We want to battle food loss by using vegetables that wouldn’t otherwise be used because they are too big, too small, not pretty enough, because they don’t have the ‘right’ shape, or simply due to overproduction. So far we have rescued 5 tonnes of vegetables!
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Food Solutions changed my life. It gave me the opportunity to build something I’m passionate about and make a positive impact on the world. The programme helps you test the waters of entrepreneurship with minimal risk: perfect for anyone with entrepreneurial ambitions.
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Thank you, EIT Food, for the opportunity to participate in the Food Solutions Challenge “From Leaf to Root – Holistic Use of Vegetables”, where I deepened R&D about food innovation by collaborating directly with expert companies in the different food sectors. Moreover, after my graduation, I had the opportunity to execute an internship in one of the partner companies of EIT Food.
Why Join Food Solutions?
- Build your professional skills
- Develop your entrepreneurial mindset
- Network with food industry professionals
- Chance to win financial prizes
- Gain specialist food industry knowledge
- Access technical facilities and visit industry sites
- Receive mentoring from industry and academic experts
- Opportunity to pitch to the food industry
What You Will Achieve
- Analyse the food system and identify a problem that can be addressed by a sustainable solution
- Collaborate with a multi-disciplinary team and mobilise resources to develop a solution to a food system problem
- Evaluate a target market and competitors in order to assess the commercial potential for a product innovation
- Critically assess alternative product concepts to craft and communicate a sustainable value proposition
- Iteratively design a prototype using MVP (minimum viable product) principles
- Adopt technologies and techniques to deliver an innovative product and viable business case
How to Apply
Interested?
Further information, email the Challenge Leaders before the recruitment period closes!
- Sip by Sip: Fabian Bättig | Swiss Food Research | fabian.baettig@swissfoodresearch.ch
- Full Protein: Fabian Bättig | Swiss Food Research | fabian.baettig@swissfoodresearch.ch
- Circular Young: Ilke Uysal Ünalan | Aarhus University | iuu@food.au.dk
- Waste-To-Value: İlknur Şahin | Foodback/Impact Hub İstanbul | ilknur@foodback.co
Or get in touch with us with any questions at food.solutions@eitfood.eu!
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