Our Report About Food+Tech Meetup: Healthy And Sustainable Food

Finally Food+Tech Meetup is back in town. Startups, enterprises and members of the community involved in the food sector, met at Il C’entro the 12th of september in Bologna. The goal of the event aimed to highlight and develop together the necessity of new business models bonded with environmental and social fair policies. Our founder of the Future Food Institute, Sara Roversi, welcomed over 60 participants and launched the event’s theme: healthy and sustainable food. She highlighted the goals of the Institute, reminding us that nowadays a successful food business model is not based on (just) profits, instead it should be also focused on environmental and social sustainability. Simone Gozzi, nutrition manager of Camst Group, was the first speaker of the event. Simone welcomed us to the company’s location and showed us how the company is developing a mindful attitude towards those pressing issues. “Healthy and delicious” is their new format, that guarantees customers a good, tasty and healthy meal. He then spoke about the cooperation between Camst and Last Minute Market in developing a project that would note the environmental footprint of a product in its label, aiming to empower the consumer in his/her choices. Camst sells 53 million meals per year all over Italy, a huge number that has the power to make a big impact on the project. The following speech was held via video message by Danielle Gould, founder of Food+Tech Connect and Food+Tech Meetup. The young enterpreneur shared the inspiration behind her company’s story which it started six years ago. The  aim was to bring together enterpreneurs who wanted to work together to change the food system through new business models and new technologies, to share their work and connect with others, learning from each other. In NYC, they were able to raise their membership base from 4 to 4000 and aim to become a leader for every food&tech community all around the world. All this was made possible thanks to a simple key-concept: innovation. Ideas, new talents and a willingness to success in finding a way to adapt new technologies in order to find our way back to local, organic, ecologic and natural food-system. Following Danielle’s speech, Future Food Institute project Manager, Francesco Castellana, introduced our special guests on stage: the startups who embody all those values. The first young enterpreneur of our meetup was Enrico Tarantino, founder of Freeglù, who presented his idea in a mistery box. Freeglu is a monthy delivery service that delivers boxes  full of gluten-free high quality products, carefully selected in Italy and abroad. The purpose of the startup is to give to the cosumers a wide variety of products. Beyond the flavour, in the food sector quality means also the provenience, the production techniques, the wealth of the small producers and the certainty that what we eat is healthy. Bite4bite, The Algae Factory program, was created to guarantee the transparency regarding product origin, empowering consumers in their choices. The startup, founded by Pierluigi Santoro and Stefania Abbona, produces algae and premium cocoa beans bars: this is the ideal example of a way to launch onto the market of superfoods like Spirulin in a tasty and pocket-sized format. Afterwards, Vincenzo Longo, founder of Ufoody, explained to us why his online-market is highly valuable: it delivers only the best high quality food products. Passion, tradition and gastronomic culture are the keys of Ufoody, that tells also the history of the product, enhancing the territory, the producer and the specific production techniques. The last startup was BioMedFood, represented by Francesca Raffaelli, biologist and nutritionist, who offers specific nutrional solutions for their costumers, combining high level scientific research with healthy and balanced products. Nowadays, since we have a limited amount of time to spend at the table, we do not pay attention to what we eat, but it is still important to keep a good state of health and to prevent illnesses through a good diet: Biomedfood can help the consumers. Domenico Canzoniero, who held the last pitch of the event, launched us his invitation to participate at Green Retail Forum Expo, on September, 22nd in Milan. The event’s theme is the necessity to direct our purchases towards mindful consumption: it can be accelerated not only by the transparency of the producers but also of the retailers. The solution is to note on the label or in the grocery stores the origines and the production techniques of the products on the shelves. In addition, the Future Food Institute will participate as a guest with its own workshop called “True Food: transparency from farm to work” where startuppers, innovators and food experts will discuss about new ways to strenghten and realize the necessity of a transparent labelling, that can guarantee the food safety. As per the rest of the evening, the Meetup ended with an aperitivo, which allowed participants to benefit from the  chance to network among startups, enterpreneurs and community members, allowing them to discuss in more depth the issue of health and sustainability and how they  can be better defined and implemented in their business. We are looking forward for our next Food+Tech Meetup and to see you all again! Do not forget to follow us on our official webpage to be updated. Stay tuned!