Building a Brighter Food Future with the LAUNCH Food Innovators

February 1, 2017
Posted in
February 1, 2017 casper

Between September and December of 2016, nearly 300 innovators submitted proposals to the LAUNCH Food challenge. The applicant pool spanned 74 countries across six continents, and their ideas ranged from farming hacks to more efficient processing methods to creative ways of diverting food waste.

Now, the LAUNCH Food team is thrilled to announce our 12 innovators: 11 from the LAUNCH Food challenge and one from the affiliated LAUNCH Legends challenge. After an intensive series of technical and partner reviews involving the LAUNCH Food network and challenge partners, these innovators were judged to be the most promising in terms of technical viability, potential impact on health outcomes, and more. They’re promoting health through surprising ingredients, like edible insects and coffee cherry pulp. They’re developing digital platforms to creatively connect farmers to consumers, and to help industry and government decision-makers. And, through the LAUNCH Legends challenge, they’re using cutting-edge tools like Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality to bring impact-driven public health storytelling to life.

Meet the 2017 LAUNCH Food innovators below:

  1. Dipika Matthias: Coffee Flour is a nutritionally dense flour made from discarded coffee cherry pulp and skin.

  2. Beverley Postma: HarvestPlus has developed staple food crops enriched to provide between 25% and 100% of daily requirements for vitamin A, iron, and zinc.

  3. Jarrod Goldin: Entomo Farms makes high-quality protein products from sustainably farmed, free-range insects

  4. Habib Saqib: Telenor Pakistan presents Telenor Mobile Agriculture, a customized mobile agriculture advisory and direct farmer-to-consumer eCommerce platform.

  5. Joanna Kane-Potaka: From ICRISAT, Smart Food is a campaign to popularize food that is good for you, the planet, and the farmer– starting with millets and sorghum.

  6. Robert Oliver: The world-renowned chef will lead Pacific Islands Food Revolution, a health education initiative tailored to audiences in the Pacific Islands that includes a reality TV format, multimedia, and creation of a social movement.

  7. Bruce Neal: FoodSwitch is a program that helps shoppers choose better foods, industry make healthier products, and government set effective policies.

  8. Kirsty Bayliss: From Murdoch University, Breaking the Mould is a plasma-based treatment that extends the life of fresh produce by delaying mold growth.

  9. Jeremy Fryer-Biggs: Evaptainers is a robust, efficient, and low-cost refrigeration solution powered by only water and sunlight.

  10. Marc Noyce and Brendan Condon: Foodwall is a modular, user-friendly, and extremely water-efficient urban food growing system.

  11. Salah Sukkarieh: The University of Sydney has developed a data-driven digital platform connecting small-scale farmers to a global growing community while helping increase growing capacity.

  12. Tash Tan: As a selected innovator in our LAUNCH Legends challenge* for cutting-edge storytelling around public health, S1T2’s Tash Tan will develop a creative technology experience to inspire cultural movements that bring pride back to traditional healthy eating within targeted sites in the Pacific Islands.

What’s next? The innovators are beginning the acceleration process in preparation for the LAUNCH Food Forum in March 2017. Watch this space for updates!

*LAUNCH Legends is a program supported by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.