Innovative Concepts to Feed a Growing Global Population

The BAADER Innovation Day ID#1 featured scientists and visionaries with ground-breaking ideas on the future of the food value chain.

How is it possible to guarantee food for this growing population, even though there is ever less space in which to live and an ever-decreasing amount of natural resources?

The BAADER Innovation Day ID#1, which was held on 29 August 2019 at the BAADER Technology Center in Lübeck, was dedicated to answering this question. And the event got under way with a brilliant keynote speech by Prof. David Hughes, widely known as Dr Food. He listed three problems for the global meat industry: the environment, health and animal welfare.

Jeffrey Davis from iSeaPartners asked the question ‘What if?’ What if it were possible to optimise all production processes by connecting all end devices and machines to the cloud? Then we could cut working costs as well as make better use of energy and raw materials and we would have a shorter link to the consumer while improving traceability and sustainability. He then presented technology that makes it possible to analyse the entire supply chain, re-evaluate existing studies, calculate all variables relating to production output and quality, provide microbial diagnostic results, produce future models using machine learning, draw up cost–benefit analyses and make efficiency forecasts for specific operational changes.

Wim de Laat from the Dutch company BioscienZ, which specialises in the development of new business models based on scientific insights, was the next speaker. He explained that fermentation processes have been used for a very long time in the production of food. The BioscienZ fermentation laboratory has developed a new fermentation process that permits the production of high-quality meat substitute using local raw materials such as potatoes and sugar beet.

Dr Matthias Moser is the managing director of Hydrosol, a company that improves the market success of food with innovative stabilising and texturizing systems. He critically reflected on how accustomed humans have become to eating (so much) meat. He talked about attractive alternatives as a bridge towards a plant-based future, also saying that it would remain important to work on the look, texture and taste of the food, because humans are creatures of habit who are both slow and reluctant to break with established behaviour patterns and habits.

Prof. Töpfl from the German Institute of Food Technologies (DIL) is dedicated to the transfer of findings from research into practice; the link between science and practice.  

Thor Sigfusson, founder and chairman of Iceland Ocean Cluster made the case for reducing the silos and establishing a better link between science and business. Getting more out of the available resources – regardless of what kind of protein or product group is involved – that he would like to see increasingly rooted in everybody’s minds when sourcing and processing food.

Feras Alsamawi, senior manager of digital innovation EMEA at Amazon Web Services explains how Amazon always starts radically from the customer and the customer experience and then works its way back to the separate components and disciplines that contribute to this customer success, when driving innovations.

BAADER concluded the day by extending its sincere thanks to all of the speakers. It became clear that it is by no means just about producing innovative machinery at the company. It is about food and feeding people. ‘At BAADER, we are driven by our vision “Innovating Food Value Chains”. Let us all work together to find solutions for feeding this growing world on a sustainable basis,’ summarises Dennis Lohmann, head of product management at BAADER.