Thought For Food Challenge 2022

“How do we feed 10 billion people on a hotter planet?” This is a big and purposefully broad question – we want you to think about it and address it in a way that is meaningful to you and your market.

Over the 6-week TFF Challenge period, you can dive into curated, on-demand digital content, weekly entrepreneurship, and topic-related live sessions that feature industry leaders and successful agrifood tech startups, and can access 24/7 support. By signing up, you also gain access to the TFF Digital Labs, our learning and collaboration platform that hosts resources that support you at every stage of your journey—from ideation through to incorporated startup. The TFF Digital Labs has recently undergone a significant upgrade and now offers increased functionality and more content. You’ll read more on the following pages.

Unlike other prize challenges and startup competitions, TFF focuses on collaboration and sharing in everything we do. From the very first step of signing up for the TFF Challenge, participants must find teammates to work with – and, more often than not, these teams are multidisciplinary and even across countries, cultures, and language lines. As these teams progress through the Challenge process, we incentivize them to share their ideas and perspectives openly with each other and to connect with other teams around the world to answer each other’s questions. We offer open data and open-source toolkits and encourage participants to share enabling technologies, best practices, and
know-how to accelerate the speed and impact of beneficial innovation. True to our ethos, we make our educational curriculum available for anyone to use and also encourage you to explore and experiment with alternative business models that are based on open innovation and open data to arrive at solutions faster. We also strive to foster locally-relevant solutions that are readily implementable in the markets they are targeting. The world’s food systems are incredibly complex and need to be looked at considering local agricultural practices, traditions, and challenges. Considering agriculture’s many local factors, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Who can participate?

The TFF Challenge is a place for anyone who wants to build feasible solutions that steer the future towards sustainable, nourishing, and resilient food systems. We are calling on scientists, designers, engineers, marketers, farmers, developers, and anyone else passionate about the future of our food. No background in food and agriculture is needed.

• Open to all kinds of solutions  – beyond and inclusive of the above-listed Topical Tracks.
• Participants should join as teams of 2-5 with members between the ages of 18-40.

Benefits

The TFF Challenge will without any doubt transform your life and propel your career as a social business leader. By submitting your pitch you will have the chance to win:

• USD 30,000+ in cash grants from TFF and partners.
• Invitation to the TFF Academy, a personalized 4-month acceleration program featuring hands-on mentoring and pitch training (priceless!).
• Professional production of a short film about your solution.
• Chance to pitch to investors and industry leaders at the global TFF Summit.
• Additional perks are offered by TFF’s broad network of partners, including free datasets, industry introductions, and training sessions.
• Access to life-changing connections from TFF’s global changemaker community.

Topical prizes

• Nutrition in Africa – Improving Feed Prize: How might we improve animal and livestock health via nutritious and sustainable feeds? (with DSM).
• Sustainable Farming Inputs Prize: How might we enable farmers to learn about and use sustainable farming methods and make informed decisions that help them to integrate biologicals into their practices? (with Hello Nature).
• The Business Case for Regeneration Prize: How do we make regenerative agriculture profitable to create a strong case for the planet and people? (with Danone).
• Web3 in Agriculture Prize: How can we leverage and integrate Web3 approaches to accelerate the transition to more open, inclusive, transparent, resilient food and agricultural systems? (with Cargill).
• Food Security and Resilience Prize: How might we support smallholder farmers and poor, vulnerable populations who are affected by the triple threats of Covid, Climate Change, and Conflicts? (with World Food Forum) And more to come!

All pitch submissions are eligible for the TFF Challenge prizes. All teams will go through the same TFF Challenge program regardless of whether they want to apply for a specific prize or not.

Solution areas

The TFF Challenge is looking for locally-relevant solutions that can be scaled globally and which address a wide range of pressing challenges across all parts of the food value chain—from production to distribution through to consumption and waste.

Teams are called on to leverage science and technology breakthroughs in areas like artificial intelligence, robotics, fintech, and biotechnology, and to utilize inclusive business models such as circularity, open data, and sharing economy. In addition to the topical prizes, the following solution areas are of particular interest:

• Nutritious foods;
• Novel flavors and aromas;
• Alternative proteins;
• Regenerative agricultural production systems (crops, aquaculture, livestock);
• Controlled environment agriculture;
• Appropriate technology for smallholders;
• And transparent and inclusive supply chains.

Timeline

Key dates at a glance.

• April 22: Sign-ups open
• July 14: Pitch deadline (at 12 am Eastern Standard Time)
• September 5: TFF Academy starts
• September 30: TFF Summit
• December 23: TFF Academy ends