Pastures in the far north and coffee flour: what solutions were proposed by DeepFoodTech 2023 experts

The conference was opened by EFKO Executive Director Sergey Ivanov. He began the event by discussing the global trends that will shape the food market in the next decade.

The main question that set the tone for the entire conference was “How to feed 10 billion people?”

According to Sergei Ivanov, the nutrition of the entire population is divided into two parts: the “urban” diet, where residents consume 3.5 thousand calories per day, a thousand of which are “empty” and “agrarian”. Residents who eat according to the second type consume no more than 1,500 calories and their diet is much more meager.

In the next ten years, it will be those billions of people who eat the “agricultural” diet who will determine the global food agenda. Ivanov cites data from the FAOFood and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations which forecasts a 50% increase in food demand by 2050.

Key barriers to meeting the demand for food: lack of land, water, suitable climate for agriculture and destruction of biodiversity.

Ivanov also attaches great importance to the “green” revolution that took place in the 20th century and allowed four billion people to switch to an “urban” diet.

However, this “green” revolution had a strong impact on the environment:

• 30% of greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system,

• 2 billion hectares of forests destroyed,

• soil degradation,

• The destruction of biodiversity is the sixth mass extinction of species.

Returning to the key theme of his speech, Sergei Ivanov also named the trends that determine development:

• Growing demand for food

• Increase the charge by one unit of nature,

• climate change,

• Healthy diet for “urbans”,

• The emergence of cutting-edge technologies in food.

The conference was continued by Temitope Adegorye, Managing Partner of Sahel Consulting. The speaker dedicated his intervention to the key issues of Nigeria as a mirror of all of Africa related to food.

According to Temitope, now the key task of the entire continent is to produce enough food to feed the entire population and become an independent region.

The solution to this problem Temitope called the development of technology, the transition to relevant agricultural methods and tools, as well as the creation of infrastructure.

Regarding the main objectives, the businessman focused on the importance of reducing post-harvest losses. So, according to him, today in Nigeria after harvesting, 25% of wheat and 40% of the total amount of vegetables are lost.

Another speaker from Africa was Olmo Molla, founder and CEO of COFFEE RESURRECT, which produces and exports coffee from Ethiopia.

The coffee business is an important part of the Ethiopian economy, but it is also very damaging to the environment.

Olmo sees the solution in the development of processing technologies: from coffee waste, for example, it is possible to produce flour and butter, which are more nutritious than many analogues. According to the businessman, the competent use of coffee residues can solve the problem of hunger in Africa. The speaker ended his intervention with the phrase “You can’t drink coffee, but you can eat it.”

Elisabeth Santin, independent R&D and sustainable development consultant, co-founder of the Instituto Veo por dentro, continued the cycle of presentations. Elisabeth’s speech was dedicated to the current trends and problems of livestock in Brazil.

Animal meat production has a huge impact on the climate, but there are many ways to reduce the damage. Elisabeth suggests phasing out antibiotics, improving soil quality (because the amount of gases emitted into the atmosphere depends on the animals’ nutrition) and using technology to monitor the situation and reduce animal mortality.

In general, in her speech, she paid special attention to the rejection of antibiotics – according to her, manufacturers use them without thinking, even when they cannot solve the problem in any way.

The future of food development, according to Elizabeth, lies in the combination of animal husbandry and laboratory meat production.

A little later, Danil Maklakov, the founder of steMeat, talked about the development and production of cellular meat. His company is one of the few that develops this area in Russia. SteMeat, according to Maklakov, managed to reduce the cost of a key component for production – fetal serum – several dozen times, from 500 thousand (the cost of Western competitors) to two thousand rubles.

Danil also talked about other key differences between his project and its competitors; for example, the company’s researchers remove not only muscle tissue, but also fat, allowing you to literally synthesize a whole steak. The company plans to enter the market in 2025, now the project is in the certification process.

Dinesh Chohan, Vice President and Head of Affiliate Programs at DeHaat, gave his thoughts on how to feed India’s 1.5 billion people. DeHaat is a b2f platform that provides a comprehensive infrastructure for the interaction between manufacturers and companies.

Dinesh believes that it is necessary to introduce innovative technologies in the country’s agriculture, he especially highlighted drones, blockchain and mobile applications.

The participants recalled the speech of Rinaldo Mallyamov, who proposed to use the territories of the Far North as food support for Russia.

The owner of the RINa project, DER Nomadic Farms, an animal and bird consultant for the creation of pasture ecosystems, has done a lot of research and experimentation. One of the most important is the reconstruction of the local historical ecosystem, a kind of “return to the roots”. It is the entire chain of the ecosystem, according to Mallyamov, that allows minimizing and maximizing the cost of human labor.

The expert devoted part of his speech directly to the Arctic. In his speech, he emphasized that this region is already a center of attraction and feeding for all birds, and the polar day with the sun that never sets and the rapid softening of the climate can become the most powerful engines for the development of the region for animals. agriculture.

Scientific reports became another area of ​​speeches at the conference. Thus, Petr Sergiev, Director of the AN Belozersky Research Institute of Physical Chemistry and the Institute of Functional Genomics at Lomonosov Moscow State University, spoke about the results of their two-year joint research with EFKO in the field of autophagy and Cell nutrition.

Sergiev shared that his team succeeded in creating a high-throughput detection system for autophagy activators based on cell structures. The search for auto-renewal triggers is currently underway in several directions.

The aim of the new EFKO and Moscow State University project is to develop a line of drugs that trigger the regeneration process in humans at the intracellular level.

The next speaker was Sergey Portnov, CEO of Biopraktika. His story was devoted to seven years of research on the technology of synthesis of microbial proteins for food from natural gas.

Nadezhda Orlova, Head of the Innopraktika Expert Group, Head of the Department of Economics of Innovation in Agriculture of the Agricultural Research Institute of the Higher School of Economics, spoke about the tools for developing green agrobiotechnology.

The expert paid attention to the industrial revolution 4.0, the new value orientations of the younger generation, political, economic and structural challenges, new cross-sector technologies.

The conference ended with a speech by Dmitry Alekseev, Scientific Director of the Educational Medical University. Dmitry spoke about an experiment conducted in conjunction with EFKO, the goal of which was to find out whether it is possible to influence people’s health through educational activities.

Alekseev shared brief results: 660 people took part in the experiment, of which 350 passed tests to check their health on their own. After 12 weeks of speaking in mini-groups and studying educational materials, 25% of the 350 respondents passed the second analysis. Analyzes showed a performance improvement of 77%.

The expert said that he sees potential in the project and called on the conference participants to join.

Parallel to the interventions of the experts, the “Food Alley of the Future” ran throughout the day at DeepFoodTech 2023. Conference participants were able to taste Hi! vegetable meat dishes, try KEN-KO fermented black garlic, whose recipe it is more than five thousand years old.

The start-up “DoEdu” introduced the conference guests to meat, poultry and vegetables cooked using sous-vide technology. We talk about other unusual projects in Food Alley of the Future here.

Any industry conference is always a powerful networking tool. And so that startups and investors could establish commercial ties, at DeepFoodTech 2023 b2b negotiations were organized in speed-dating format.

The “speed dating” took place in two stages, each for one hour. There were 10 pairs of participants in total, four minutes were given for a total with each one. To facilitate communication, each participant received a special brochure with the contact details of all other members of the negotiations.

In total, 40 people participated in speed dating.

All photos can be seen at the link. We will be delighted to see you at our future conferences!

Video recording of the entire speech program will be later, we will make an announcement about it in the DeepFoodTech Telegram chat https://t.me/deepfoodtech