By Percy Chen, Junior Project Manager Art-Science
On September 19, the ninth Café des Sciences: The Invisible Growth of Food Tech took place at the swissnex China office. Mr. Fabian Graf, the Co-founder and CEO of the food technology startup Faitron, gave an exceptionally interesting presentation on the new trend Food 2.0 and its connection to his entrepreneurial development.
Mr. Graf introducing Food 2.0 concepts
What is Food 2.0?
Food 2.0 is a trend that aims to transform the way we eat and make food more sustainable, innovative, wholesome, as well as responsible.
Why do we need Food 2.0?
Three reasons.
The majority of diets nowadays focuses on meat, which uses up a lot of resources. Producing a pound of beef consumes 16 times more energy than a pound of grain and requires up to 100 times more water.
Animal brutality and its consequences: to make more profit, factories use all means to reduce costs and increase unit output. Animals are almost always stored in tiny spaces with bars limiting their movements, forcing them to eat, sleep, and repeat. In addition, the extensive use of various antibiotics is problematic, for it will eventually be passed on to humans. Finally, once an infectious disease breaks out, all the animals in the farm must be culled. Recently, more than 100 million pigs died to a swine fever epidemic and it is still on going.
Finally, in terms of nutrition and health care, researches have shown that in general cases, plant proteins are healthier than red or white meat.
How do we do Food 2.0?
Many startups have attempted to develop new ingredients or processing methods to replace animal proteins with plant proteins. One example is the startup Impossible Food – its impossible burger received favorable reviews for tasting like beef. Likewise, in Switzerland, ETH Zurich is working with companies such as Nestlé to launch its future food initiatives. The aim is to train students to address the challenges of sustainable food supply by researching and developing high quality, healthy and cheap food.
In the second half of the presentation, Mr. Graf elaborated on his inspirations for Faitron. Founded in 2016, Faitron’s timeline coincided almost perfectly with the paradigm shift towards healthier food. Faitron’s two products, HeatsBox and BabyBoo, provide convenient ways for people to take out food and monitor food temperature to ensure safety.
The audiences showed immense interests and asked questions ranging from the technologies and patents, to the reasoning behind certain designs, as well as Mr. Graf’s opinions toward cheaper alternatives on Taobao. Indeed, the discussion was fruitful and it continued even after the event.
Once again, we would like to thank Mr. Fabian Graf for his excellent speech and our audiences for their enthusiastic engagements!
If you are interested in Faitron and would like to provide feedbacks via a survey, feel free to join here. Likewise, for more pictures from the event, please click here.
Stay tuned for our next event！
Audience members asking about BabyBoo, one of Faitron’s products.