EIT Food announces winners of Prize Based Challenge on Personalised Nutrition
Challenge aims to find new solutions to reduce obesity and malnutrition
EIT Food has today announced the winners of its first Prize Based Challenge on Personalised Nutrition For All. The challenge, created in partnership with Food Valley NL and Food Innovation Hub Europe, is a call to action to find innovation solutions to reduce obesity and malnutrition. The Personalised Nutrition for All Challenge invited multi-stakeholder groups, startups and early-stage solutions that support these focus areas to submit proposals for review.
The six winners, announced at the EIT Food Annual Event in Brussels, were chosen against three tracks: Route to Market, which looks at reducing obesity and malnutrition by making tools more affordable and accessible to a broader community; Behavioural Change, exploring how we can empower consumers to manage their health; and Science & Big Data, seeking to enable a more targeted approach to consumers' health.
The winners in each category are:
Track 1: Route to Market
- EKTAH: Providing new nutritional solutions to reduce body weight gain.
- Nutrinomics & Ligue Cardio: Making personalised nutrition accessible to high-risk, underprivileged populations.
- L3M Technologies Ltd t/a Salus Optima: The integration of real-time metabolic, behavioural and lifestyle monitoring into a personalised nutrition service for effective weight-loss and health-gain.
Track 2: Behavioural Change
- Aigecko Technologies SL: An AI-based nutritional tracker for objective, continuous, friendly and easy to use food intake monitoring.
- Roche Diagnostics: Simple personalisation for large groups of consumers in a health care setting, with the aim of preventing people with pre-diabetes from developing diabetes.
Track 3: Science & Big Data
- Verdify: Using technology and nutrition science to provide hyper personalised nutrition recipes to help tackle obesity.
EIT Food also gave special recognition to Venner Oy, which uses technology and play to increase personalised fruit and vegetable consumption during early years in child health centres.
Developing viable new solutions
“Worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975, while 3.5 billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies."
“However, by finding new solutions in personalised nutrition, we can help consumers to understand more about their bodies and thereby empower them to better manage their own health. However, there is still a need to make these technologies not only more accessible and affordable to a broader community but also more user-friendly and engaging.”
Each of the winners will be awarded €30,000, with the possibility of further funding from EIT Food in the future. The prize money will be used to support the development of the proposed solution into a viable project plan over the course of two to six months. EIT Food will select the most promising projects among the winners and allocate enough funding to sustain the development to go to market.
EIT Food’s second Prize Based Challenge will focus on cultivated meat, with winners to be announced at the EIT Food Venture Summit on 26th October 2022.
