Green Week Berlin: Food Start-ups - Reinventing Food Business
How are food start-ups changing the food business? This was the topic of the panel "Food Start-ups - Reinventing Food-Business" yesterday at the International Green Week in Berlin.
Digitalisation is changing the way we produce, distribute, buy and enjoy food. It enables new products, new players, new consumer behaviour - and it requires companies to think in a new way. Olaf Deininger and Hendrik Haase, the authors of the forthcoming book Food Code, talked to us about this.
Dr Helmut Leopold (CIO of myEnso),
Alexander Zacharuk (CEO Futuro Farming),
Andreas Schweikert(Bitkom),
Alexander Piutti (Founder & CEO at SPRK.global) and
Jens Krüger (CEO Bonsai Research)
Digitalisation and especially innovative start-ups are changing the entire value chain in the food sector - from the barn to the customer's fridge. Futoro Farming, for example, offers an early warning system that detects the first signs of possible diseases based on the movements of calves and warns the farmer. The AI-powered distribution platform SPRK-Global has declared war on food waste by, for example, enabling the rapid distribution of food surpluses via NGOs. And the radically customer-centric online supermarket myEnso has not only become an outstanding platform for the products of food start-ups, but has even opened stationary supermarkets at the request of customers that do more than just provide basic supplies for people in rural regions.
One of Jens Krüger's topics at the event was the question of how large retail companies have to change in order to establish real customer proximity. Retail must "of course" serve the trend towards sustainability and conscious lifestyle, which the Trendbüro and Bonsai have been measuring for years in the Values Index, and which is currently also confirmed by the Otto Group's trend study Ethical Consumption.
"Sustainability and conscious consumption have arrived in the mainstream - that is certainly a big topic for retail. But it is not the only one," Jens Krüger emphasises. In view of many households in precarious situations, the hard discount will definitely also gain in importance again: "We see that discounters who have upgraded in recent years are definitely examining whether this was the right way to go". The big retailers are facing just as important challenges here as the food manufacturers, who are increasingly being driven by food start-ups
The new future study by Trendbüro and Bonsai Research is also related to this. The study Vitalising Retail is about understanding the new food consumption and developing sustainable strategies for the time during and after Corona. To this end, the study brings together FMCG manufacturers, retailers, consumers and visionaries from outside the industry - and will subsequently test its results directly in retail.
The Green Week panels were broadcast from Messe Berlin's new streaming studio.