PROJECTS

We create high-potential Food-Agri-Tech startups and collaborate with resident founders in designing better products and services. We assist Angel Investors, Venture Capital and Private Equity in funding scalable startups with good projects and a profitable business model. We collaborate in Open Innovation and Digital Transformation projects with SMEs, PAs and Large Corporations.

We are currently working on various projects in a few main areas: precision agriculture for high-yield varieties (quantitative and qualitative), new dry and fresh products with low perishability for immediate or rapid consumption, fermented foods and functional fermentations. Innovative cooking systems using low energy and little space, digital platforms to innovate the food supply chain.

Throughout most of the world, agriculture is among the last major industries still largely operating in a traditional way, with great expenditure of energy and a relatively low level of applied innovation. In Italy, the problem is particularly significant, with low penetration of precision agriculture: we lag far behind (less than 20 percent) other European nations such as the Netherlands, where adoption of innovative farming systems is over 60 percent.

Italy needs to increase its agricultural production and at the same time make it more sustainable, reducing consumption of time, energy, water and chemical fertilizers and pesticides. We understand the need to use chemistry in many types of agriculture and have nothing against it in principle, however, it should be used as little as possible, in a targeted way and only if the added productivity justifies the inevitable impact on the ecosystem where it is being used.

Precision agriculture has the potential to help us achieve these goals and is a key step in ensuring economic sustainability and competitiveness for the production chains responsible for the country's food security in an uncertain global production landscape that is already facing the severe impacts of climate change.

Innovative solutions for the agriculture of the future must be developed to make this transition as simple and quick as possible, designed to be easy to adopt and put food and the people for whom it is produced at the center.

Fermentations have been a fundamental part of human nutrition since the invention of agriculture. A series of natural processes resulting from the activity of microorganisms that we have learned to control throughout history to preserve, process and enrich a great many foods.

The food industry and modern production chains have made the consumption of fresh or preserved products by alternative methods to fermentation much easier, reducing the need for fermented foods and their consumption by people, which in the West is normally limited to the consumption of alcoholic beverages and leavened bread.

New applications of fermentation techniques, whether in an advanced artisanal or industrial context and aided by the information produced by ongoing research on the subject, represent enormous potential for the production of new sustainable, healthy, and functional for the body food products to be reintroduced or added as new gastronomic horizons in people's diets. In many parts of the world, fermented foods have never lost their central role in the way people eat, and the traditions that have been maintained are a technical and gastronomic wealth from which there is much to learn.

We study the world of fermentations carefully because of the great personal interest in them and the strong economic opportunities we recognize.

We are working on several levels to facilitate the development of fermentations as a technical horizon of the food world and to make more people-consumers and industry insiders-aware of the interesting food products that can be developed, as well as other non-food products of fermentations that can be used as substitute raw materials for other uses.

We don't always notice, but we consume large amounts of dry or fresh preserved products. So are pasta, so are cookies and crackers, so are many energy bars, snacks and juices, and many products such as jams, mousses, sauces and other stabilized foods.

Unfortunately, many of these products have a strong perishability, however: just leave the package open for a few minutes and they lose much of their palatability, are easily contaminated or are attacked by insects and molds. There are some products that can remain edible for years, but they are often unpalatable, such as the crackers in emergency rations.

Often these products are also unhealthy foods, not so much because of the presence of artificial preservatives, but because of the characteristics that are decided to give the product, high in fat and added sugars as in the case of snacks and fruit juices.

Preserved products, if well designed in their physical and nutritional characteristics, are an important resource for our diet. As healthy and nutritious as fresh produce, if not more so, they can make cooking more convenient and household food management easier, increasing product shelf life and fighting food waste

The use of preserved foods also would enable producers in the food chain to devise new products to make full use of agricultural production and reduce waste, for example, by developing products that, once dehydrated, are used as basic ingredients in dry goods and various culinary preparations.

It may sound trivial, but still today we cook mainly with fire or at least heat, a lot of heat generally and for long cooking times. This traditional way of cooking requires time, attention and space, three things of which there is less and less availability in today's life. This is not only the case in the U.S., where now half of all meals eaten are no longer prepared at home, but also in many parts of the world including Europe: many homes no longer even have a kitchen or have a very small one without a stove. Can you cook at home in an unconventional way? Can you really cook with the microwave? How much should foods be cooked and how? Many questions, some of which we are studying an answer for with specific projects.

There are many applications and services that promise to solve every problem of each of the players in the supply chain (from the lettuce grower to the final consumer who eats it in salads); however, the functions performed are very vertical and overall we are a long way from real integration of the “food system,” with several needs remaining unanswered and many systemic inefficiencies yet to be overcome.

Many of the limitations of current solutions stem from not questioning some of the logic and bad practices of traditional supply chains: in this way, platforms almost always-under a veneer of innovation-end up digitizing the same processes as ever, bringing many of the inefficiencies that have always been present in the food industry back into the digital domain.

Instead, at Foodendi we believe we have identified some key points around which to redesign flows and processes that we can leverage to make a major leap forward in the efficiency and sustainability of the food system.

We are working to translate this into a modular SAAS platform that will bring significant added value to supply chain processes and real benefits for each individual stakeholder, facilitating true integration of the whole system.