Ayming and IBM partner Future Food-Tech Summit
On the 17th of October, the Future Food-Tech Summit will return to London, bringing together over 500 leaders, senior executives and pioneering innovators from around the globe to discuss the future of food production. This year professional services firms IBM and Ayming are partnering with the event, with Ayming hosting a round-table on innovation funding mechanisms.
A third of the food produced worldwide is wasted annually, costing the global economy a staggering $1.2 trillion. As well as an economic cost, this also has a severe sustainability impact, something which is increasingly seeing people turn away from resource intensive meat farming, and exploring alternative proteins. Disruptive businesses capitalising on this are attracting the attention of investors: from alcohol-free spirits through to vertical farming and vegan snacks, the food and drink sector shows no let-up in innovation.
Helping companies navigate this fast-changing environment, Future Food-Tech is an international innovation and investment summit, held annually in London, San Francisco and New York. Focused on harnessing technology to address the critical issues facing the global food industry, the summit brings together global food-brands, investors and entrepreneurs to create new alliances and accelerate the adoption and commercialisation of new products and solutions across the food sector.
Now in its 5th year, the Future Food-Tech Summit returns to London and brings together over 500 leaders, senior executives, pioneering innovators and VCs from around the globe. The international innovation and networking summit offers a platform to share ideas, cultivate high-impact partnerships and push forward new solutions to the food system’s most pressing issues. The summit will also host 60 world-leading speakers and some of the market’s fastest growing start-ups, exploring plant-based and cultured proteins, personalised nutrition, ingredient innovation, gene-editing for health and sustainability, and food waste reduction.
The event is partnered by a range of corporate entities, including a number of technology and advisory firms. Global IT professional services giant IBM is a gold partner of Future Food-Tech Summit, presenting its blockchain expertise to the food and drink sector, having worked with more than 400 clients across financial services, supply chains, IoT, risk management, digital rights management and healthcare to build and implement blockchain applications.
Business performance consultancy Ayming is a silver partner at the London summit, meanwhile. The firm will also be hosting a roundtable as part of the event’s programme of interactive sessions. Led by Ashley Pollock, Assistant Manager for Innovation, the group will be discussing innovation funding mechanisms and how new product development (NPD) can help benefit the bottom line.
Writing for Ayming in a recent report on change in the food industry, Pollock said, “As this massive industry changes in myriad ways, overlapping or incremental, we tend not to appreciate the full scale of what is happening around us… People’s behaviour is being influenced by technological leaps and their own shifting attitudes and aspirations, which are – in turn – spurring developers to unleash products and applications geared to these new and changing lifestyles. Feeding off each other, these powerful trends will continue to disrupt the food and beverage sector – and what, why and how we eat.”