Accenture Innovation Awards Shortlist 10 Agtech Businesses in Fair Foods Category

The Innovation Awards , which Accenture has been organising for nine years in the Netherlands, are an attempt to help innovative, and often startup, companies in the country get exposure to Accenture’s client base, and vice versa. There are 10 categories in total, and Fair Foods is one of the competition’s newer categories as the company tries to put a spotlight on sustainability.

Intentionally quite a broad category, some 104 businesses applied across four main themes: food e-commerce, alternative protein resources, sustainable food chain and smart farming (or precision agriculture). The jury then shortlisted 10 to move to the next stage.

They include FreshlightAgri , a business using specialist lighting to improve air quality in poultry barns — by removing volatile organic components, ammonia and fine dust which uptick the amount of pathogens in the air — through ionization. Using this system, growers can expect to give their livestock fewer antibiotics.

But in the end we based our decision on whether they were offering something new, truly sustainable. With a clear business potential,” told reporters Margrethe Jonkman, the jury chairman, and corporate director of R&D at Dutch dairy business FrieslandCampina. Today, those 10 will meet with the jury and explain in further detail what they are trying to achieve with their innovations, and from there the jury will select the final five to present at the awards ceremony at the end of the month. “It’s great to do it face-to-face and at this round we hope to really hear what their unique selling points are,” explained Jonkman. While not wanting to pick out a favorite from the group, Jonkman was particularly impressed with innovations that seek to solve food chain problems in developing trades.

Wakati , one of the finalists, for example, is building a tent to store post-harvest crops in a sterilised microclimate in order to gain their shelf life. The tent is powered by solar energy using less than 1 percent of the energy used by a refrigerator and at a fraction of the cost.

Wakati is targeting the smallholder grower marketplace across Africa. Other shortlisted sustainable food chain innovations include a fish processing machinery firm — De Boer RVS — that helps fisheries to return bycatch — or those fish species caught unintentionally — to the sea unharmed. The machinery uses a range of technology including camera detection and sorting belts. “Creating a sustainable food chain is particularly important for my company where we are always looking at new technologies that can reduce the amount of energy we use and to reduce waste, in general,” she told reporters.

Pieter Kraaijeveld is the lead of the fair foods category and available to discuss the firms further on email . Have news, tips or want to write a guest post?