Blendhub and EIT Food launch the Affordable Nutrition Scale-Up Challenge

Blendhub and EIT Food launch the Affordable Nutrition Scale-Up Challenge

EIT Food and Blendhub launch the Affordable Nutrition Scale-Up Challenge with the aim of ensuring that more people have access to sustainable and nutritious food. Both organisations are looking for startups and scaleups that have ingredients or formulas that support the promotion of healthy and sustainable diets in Europe. EIT Food is supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union.

The goal of the Affordable Nutrition Scale-Up Challenge is to help bring innovative powder-based food solutions to the next level. The most promising submitted initiatives will be selected by a jury committee and up to ten winners will receive services worth €25,000 to go from ‘idea to market’. 

Solutions submitted to the challenge should seek to dramatically improve an existing recipe; find a larger formula or recipe in which the innovative ingredient could take place because it is currently under-utilised; expand to new markets by localising the recipe or further develop the category with a new range of sub-products.

Innovating all along the food supply chain – finding new raw material sources, developing alternative nutritious solutions, and achieving more sustainable and cost-effective processes – is not an easy task.

New food companies encounter barriers such as market segmentation, high development costs, lack of data to ensure success and efficient supply chains, and achieving mass-market food quality.

Blendhub’s expertise in powder-based food products, together with EIT’s demonstrated experience and international network, will help food companies surpass these innovation barriers and speed up the time it takes to ideate, test and launch a new product onto the market, delivering more nutritious, healthier, and affordable food products to consumers.

Lorena Savani, Innovation Programme Manager at EIT Food, said: “By supporting the Affordable Nutrition Scale-Up Challenge, EIT Food aims to accelerate innovation in the food industry and ensure that more people have access to sustainable and nutritious food.

“We are excited to partner with Blendhub and leverage their expertise in powder-based food products to help startups and scaleups overcome innovation barriers and bring their ideas to market. Together, we can build a future-fit food system that produces healthier and more affordable food for all.”Henrik Stamm Kristensen, Founder and CEO at Blendhub, stated: “This initiative in collaboration with EIT Foods is fitting perfectly into our collaborative food industry platform strategy and is an excellent

opportunity to demonstrate how we can help entrepreneurial people and companies taking their new food product ideas to market faster, safer and cheaper on our global network of multi-localized hubs, which we are deploying closer to raw material producers and closer to consumers supporting sustainable global supply chains and a transiting towards a circular food economy” .

“We cannot achieve this goal alone. Multiple stakeholder collaboration and transparently shared value creation is key and with this challenge we expect to open the eyes of many value-aligned professionals and companies to join the movement and transform the global food system together”.

Applications are open from 12 April 2023 to 15 June 2023.