Barcelona’s Food & FoodTech Innovation Hub: Members’s Meet&Greet recap event | Forward Fooding

After several months of hard work, and launching our first earth-friendly menu, we are over the moon to announce that we’ve officially run the first meet and greet event of Barcelona’s first Food & FoodTech Innovation Hub.

Below is a brief recap of what came down.

In partnership with Talent Garden, the Hub is hosted at @22 in the heart of El Poblenou. The mission of our Food & FoodTech Innovation hub is to create the first FoodTech community of Barcelona by bringing FoodTech entrepreneurs together and helping them grow their business through collaborative resources and networks.

Having a ‘go-to’ destination for Food Innovators allows us to support food and Foodtech entrepreneurs through resources and network and foster innovation through meaningful interactions with established food organizations. 

Besides featuring a shared workspace dedicated to food and FoodTech companies, the hub features a fully-fledged podcast studio to develop multimedia content, as well as a retail-facing platform (later on next year) to sell new products from resident startups and showcase their latest innovations. 

To learn more about our hub and apply visit bcn.hub.forwardfooding.com

The event kicked off with a brief presentation of our Forward Fooding team in which Alessio, CEO of the company, introduced Clara Bartra and Mireia García, the new incorporations in the Barcelona Hub.

Clara, General Manager Spain, has more than 20 years of experience in the world of marketing and innovation in food corporations. There came a point in her career when she realised the enormous power of the food industry and at the same time the enormous difficulties it faces when it comes to innovation. Two years ago she left a large food company to focus on food innovation from a startup perspective. That’s when Forward Fooding came along, connected with our mission, and jumped right into the project.

Mireia, Head of Ecosystem, is a food engineer by training and has spent most of her professional career in large food companies. Most recently she has been building a Proptech ecosystem and that is why she’s now heading up the creation of our own FoodTech ecosystem in Spain and beyond.

Next up were our friends and partners-in-crime from Talent Garden who believe in the potential of their space to create connections. Apart from being a coworking space, Suely Figueiredo, Campus manager and Gonzalo Torres, Regional Director Spain & France defined Talent Garden as a co-learning network where to learn and grow by forming connections through this type of events, and leverage their platform to facilitate and promote initiatives such as the creation of Barcelona’s first Food and FoodTech Innovation hub.

The event then continued with introducing some of our hub members. We kickstarted with RobinGoods, where Luis Font, Founder and Paolo Fusaro, CEO presented their company’s ethos “food with soul”, as they employ people at risk of social exclusion to make their products. Then Arthur Vignaud, CEO & Founder, and Lucas Vidal, Founder & Communication Manager of Ethics Coffee spoke about their sustainable and minimal-impact approach to coffee through Cold Brew technology. Miquel Diaz, CEO and co-founder of SwearIT presented their platform which uses blockchain to improve the food manufacturing process and provides transparency of a product’s lifecycle to the end consumers.
Giuseppe Scionti CEO and Founder of NovaMeat, proposes an alternative to fibrous meats by developing cutting-edge technology solutions to feed the planet’s growing population with the next generation of plant-based food. Next on stage we had a heavy-weighter of alternative protein Bernat Añaños, CMO and Co-founder at Heura’s who talked about their commitment to creating new alternative meat options that are appetising, tasty and healthy. Heura also focuses a lot of their efforts on educating the world about the hidden costs of animal proteins by creating an empowered community of conscious consumers.
Lynette Kucsma, Co-founder and CMO of Natural Machines introduced us to Foodini, a 3D food printer. With Foodini, consumers can create innovative cooking solutions and create customised items on demand, using their own ingredients. To conclude our members’ presentations, Jaap Rommelaar, Co-founder of ZoomAgri, explained how they are transforming the TIC (Testing, Inspection & Certification) of the agri and food supply chain industry. He also explained how their technology saves 99% of the time and 85% of the costs in the analysis of agricultural products.

In addition to these top-notch entrepreneurs, we brought some of the partners located in Talent Garden to showcase their services and to enable more opportunities for collaborations with the startups. 

They are partners with a wide range of different expertise that can help solve different challenges that startups are facing. For example, we had Joaquín Guerrero, professional communication trainer, Patricio Hirsch from Sound Branding Boutique, who translates the values of companies into sounds and also runs within Talent Garden campus a fully-fledge podcast studio. Josep Navajo from Delvy Law & Finances specialising in legal support for technology companies, startups, and innovators. And finally, Josep Mir and Javier Rodriguez from Smart Foods Global, which accelerates sustainable brands in the food industry that generate positive impact.

Finally, we wrapped up the session by sharing some of the challenges that each founder is facing, and in a collaborative way, we discussed potential solutions and possible cooperations between the members of the Hub.

A massive thank you to all our fabulous members and partners which despite the pandemic situation, decided to join us and made this day possible, including Talent Garden Spain and their whole team …we really appreciated your support to make this event possible! 🙂

The biggest thank you goes to the whole Forward Fooding’s team and all the people who have supported us in this crazy journey including Mireia Garcia, Laura Jacob, Alessio D’Antino, Max Leveau, Julia Farras, Gonzalo Torres, Ivan Leider, Suely Figueiredo, Cora Plaza just to name a few. Check out the full pictures of the event here

Forward Fooding is the world’s first collaborative platform for FoodTech Data Intelligence and Corporate Startup Collaboration.