00:00All right, I'm excited to be joined now by Marad, who is one of our editors for Tech for Change.
00:05Marad, you're all about finding the good in tech, and we're going to talk about the food industry now.
00:10Absolutely, because there's a lot of standout innovation happening in the food tech sector.
00:15Yesterday I mentioned the famous Impact Mile, first time here at VivaTech,
00:18and nearly a quarter of those are devoted to food tech in one way or another,
00:22be it production, preservation, and a whole raft of other associated food tech technology.
00:28And just to give you an idea, it shows you the amount of time and energy that is being invested.
00:33I mean, estimates around 13 billion US dollars per year, which is a lot less than the 50 plus billion
00:39for climate tech,
00:40but it's still a significant chunk of investment.
00:42And I thought I could talk us through a couple of those innovations that really stood out to me at
00:47least.
00:47Yeah, that would be great. And urban farming is also being taken to a new level.
00:52Absolutely. So, you know, we've all heard about urban farms for a little while,
00:56growing vegetables on rooftops or hydroponics, whether it be in Singapore, New York, Paris.
01:02But what about if we could grow these vegetables as close to us as is physically possible?
01:07So what I'm talking about is growing this in your home, Upton, in your kitchen or in your living room.
01:12And that's what AgroGarden are really looking at.
01:14It's an automated vegetable growing machine.
01:18I'll ask you a quick question. Are you a decent gardener?
01:20Do you have a green thumb? Do you think you're nifty in the garden?
01:24Can you? Probably not.
01:26Well, if you're not, it's for you.
01:27But for everyone else, whoever's not so good, basically what you need to do is just insert what they're calling
01:32a pod,
01:33which is dried seeds, into this machine.
01:35And the AI algorithms do the rest.
01:38So they adjust what the plant needs.
01:40And all you need to do is go and enjoy yourself, go and work, go do sport.
01:43And in the few days or weeks, you'll get an SMS, a message in the app that says it's time
01:49to harvest.
01:50So pretty easy for everyone that's not green thumb minded.
01:54And if you need some more pods, you simply order them.
01:57They arrive at your door.
01:58So they're really billing it as easy as operating your coffee machine.
02:01That's amazing.
02:02That's really fascinating that we can actually get to that level of farm to table, you know, in our own
02:08house.
02:08Yeah.
02:09And there's also different types of foods that you can grow as well.
02:13I mean, once you've grown your vegetables, you need to keep them from fresh as possible.
02:18Is that right?
02:19Absolutely.
02:19So if I just end with AgroGuardian for a second, the things that you can grow in that machine,
02:25lettuces and bulbs and various things like that.
02:28And right now, you can grow them simultaneously.
02:31So that's important because I don't know how much lettuce you can eat in one week.
02:35But obviously, once food is produced in that machine or elsewhere, we need to make it last longer.
02:40We know that around a third of the food that we throw out in the world is, that we produce
02:46is thrown out.
02:47So obviously, that's, you know, not great for the environment with all the resources.
02:50And so a lot of effort has gone into actually preserving food.
02:54And I wanted to show you something that's particularly stood out to me.
02:58These are simple stickers, kind of look like childlike.
03:02See them, you know, it looks like a variety of apple, for example.
03:04And all you need to do is actually take off this sticker, pop it on a piece of fruit.
03:10This is the team from Ripe Labs.
03:12Pop it on like that.
03:14And just by doing that, I've basically prolonged the life of this apple for, I've doubled it.
03:20I've doubled its shelf life.
03:21So this is a pending technology, patent pending technology.
03:27It's a formulation that is being used in pilot studies across the United States.
03:34They've got a very first partnership with a major retailer.
03:37I can't mention the name.
03:39Testing it with strawberries.
03:40Have you ever thrown out your strawberries?
03:42Absolutely.
03:42They go bad relatively fast.
03:44Really quickly.
03:45So with this sticker, by putting this just on the plastic packet of your stickers,
03:48you can make your strawberries go from three to five days, grapes from eight to 16, lemons from 40 to
03:5460.
03:55And you can really get an idea of the amount of food, you know, fruit and vegetables that could be
03:59saved
03:59with just something as simple as a sticker.
04:02That's absolutely fascinating.
04:04It's quite astonishing when you think about how much food is wasted.
04:09What else are you watching?
04:10What else needs to be done to kind of advance this challenge?
04:14Well, obviously, the other and there's a talk happening at 9.45 on stage two.
04:20It's called Food from Waste to Opportunity.
04:23And there we've got another project that is being spoken.
04:26It's very popular here in France and some of the Scandinavian countries called Too Good to Go.
04:31So this is a partnership with retailers at the end of the day who I'm not sure if you've ever
04:35used it,
04:35but they've got produce that's not going to be used tomorrow.
04:38Tomorrow they have an app, they send it out to the millions of users, there's millions now,
04:43and you can click in and buy, you know, the food at a discounted rate from both supermarkets,
04:47from Boulangerie, a baguette, we know, a baguette's no good tomorrow.
04:51And you can come in and that's one of the Too Good to Go representative is speaking on stage two
04:56at 9.45, worth catching.
04:58That's amazing.
04:58And it's also nice because your food is actually fresh, you know.
05:02Coming from the U.S., we just throw everything in the freezer and then it lasts longer, but it's not
05:07quite great.
05:07It's not, you know, the crunch in the baguette, you know, it doesn't come out the same after it's been
05:11put in the freezer.
05:12It doesn't work the same.
05:13Thank you so much, Tech for Good, there you have it.
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