Transforming Food Prize

What is the Transforming Food Prize?

Our aim: We want to transform food production to provide the world’s growing population with safe, healthy nutrition and reduce agriculture’s impacts on the environment. We think challenge prizes could help.

The world’s population is growing, and with it, the world’s demand for food. In the coming decades, the gap between supply and demand will be most acute in the world’s most food-insecure regions, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

In addition to adapting to the growing demand for food, our food systems will also need to adapt to the changing climate. With increasing temperatures, precipitation variability, water scarcity, biodiversity losses, and other impacts of climate change, food will become increasingly difficult to produce.

But a wide range of technological innovations could make a difference. These include lab-grown meats, substitutes for animal protein including dairy, and controlled environment agriculture solutions that allow certain crops to be grown year-round, faster, with fewer inputs.

Why a challenge prize?

We need a wide range of innovations to help solve the food production challenges. Life scientists can optimise the varieties of crops and animals we farm. We can change how we produce food – automating farms, creating controlled growing environments and optimising inputs. We can create new ways of processing and combining foods to create alternatives to products like meat or dairy which have high environmental costs.

Even if the solutions are complex, the goals that innovation in food production need to deliver are often quite simple to articulate. We need to produce more food, more efficiently – using less land, water, energy or inputs. It needs to be healthy, culturally appropriate, and taste good – to meet consumer demands. These are the kinds of clear goals that a challenge prize can set.

There are countless different ways of meeting these objectives. High-tech, science-based approaches based on cutting edge research in genetics, robotics or data science. Low-tech approaches based on reinterpreting traditional farming techniques, changing consumer behaviours or increasing efficiencies in production. And it’s not just about tech – changes in business models and service innovation have a place in streamlining and modernising the way we eat.

The urgency of climate and population change means we need to act fast. And food is so fundamental a human requirement that it has never been left purely to the market. Governments and foundations spend heavily to intervene in food production and agricultural research. Creating new incentives through a challenge prize would be a valuable new component of the drive to change our food systems.

Possible designs for the Food Innovation Challenge Prize

• A technology challenge prize to encourage the development of new protein food products that are cost-effective and environmentally friendly. Protein production currently has a disproportionate environmental cost in the food system chain, especially animal-derived protein. The prize would incentivise innovators to develop new products based on protein streams that are currently underutilised (e.g. leafy tops of root vegetables, blood from abattoirs).
• A system challenge prize to revolutionise the traceability of food so that consumers can better understand the complex supply chain that ends on their plate. Creating greater efficiency in food systems is likely to mean longer supply chains, more complex or processed ingredients and – if not managed well – a risk of fraud or contamination. Traceability tech could help give consumers the confidence to embrace these new foodstuffs.
• A challenge prize on sustainable management of soil so that we can halt and reverse the damage that industrialised agriculture has caused to farmland. The prize would incentivise innovative land management techniques including new fertilisers, polyculture methods and growing of deep-rooted perennial crops.
• A challenge prize to develop and bring to market a new source of nutrition – taking a plant or bacterium that is not currently used for food production, designing a way to grow it and turn it into a saleable product.
• A challenge prize for scaling the adoption of orphan crops. Much of the food system relies on a handful of crops including wheat, maize and rice. But many valuable crops are relatively little grown and could be a contributor to global food security.

Get in touch!

These  prize ideas are designed to be a conversation starter, so tell us what you think!

The best prize ideas are developed through extensive research and engagement with experts, stakeholders and people with lived experience of the problems they are focused on. We start with a first draft like the one above – then work to improve, refine and validate our thinking.

We’re particularly keen to have conversations about this idea with potential funders and organisations working in the field. Get in touch if you’re interested – or if you think you have a better idea – and we’ll schedule a call.