Food deserts, malnutrition, obesity, starvation, GMOs and factory farming: The list of food-related issues impacting our world is a doozy. All signs point to problems in this space worsening. A cluster of innovative startups is developing in Boston, attacking each of these problems from a variety of angles.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 14 percent of households - translating to 17.4 million of them - throughout the U.S. experienced food insecurity at some point in 2014. As the population grows, access to food is only expected to be more difficult as supply falls short of demand.
According to the United Nations, population is projected to grow from 6.9 billion in 2010 to 8.3 billion in 2030 and 9.1 billion in 2050--increasing food demand by 50 percent for 2030 and by 70 percent for 2050. The supply chain we have in place and the technology that supports it are expected expected to fall far behind increasing demand.
"We’re not getting food to the right place, whether that be Northern Africa or Oakland, Calif."
Local startups are stepping up to revamp the food space as we know it. On the production side, you see everything from Grove Labs, which enables consumers to grow their household’s supply of produce at home, to Freight Farms, which allows farmers and institutions to efficiently grow crops year-round in climate-controlled and technologically-enabled shipping containers.
And then there are the companies investigating high-tech solutions to make agricultural production more effective. For instance, Cambridge-based Indigo is focusing on the production side of the supply chain. It has a team of researchers trying to discover the ideal microbiome - bacteria that live symbiotically inside plants - of food crops like maize, soybeans and wheat, to make them hardier and more resistant to environmental factors like drought or soil salinity.
But Indigo's chief executive acknowledges even a leap forward in production technology won't solve our world’s food problems.
“Right now, we’re producing enough food to feed the world,” David Perry, CEO of Indigo, told us. “In 2016, production capacity isn’t the issue. People are hungry, but it’s for economic and distribution reasons. We’re not getting food to the right place, whether that be Northern Africa or Oakland, Calif.… It’s not a lack of availability from the planet; it’s a lack of availability where the hungry person is. But as population continues to grow, that will change.”
Perry’s comments echoed those of the UN, which wrote, “The main challenge facing the agricultural sector is not so much growing 70 percent more food in 40 years, but making 70 percent more food available on the plate.”
The mainstream food supply chain includes growers, distributors, processors and shops before it makes its way to consumers’ shopping carts. With unique hurdles at every stage, such as refrigeration needs while in transit, large portions of food are lost along the way. According to the UN, about 30 percent of food produced internationally - 1.3 billion tons of it - is lost, never making it from farm to table.
Perry, a serial entrepreneur who grew up on a farm in Arkansas, moved to Boston from San Francisco to take over the reins at Indigo. He maintains the most pressing components surrounding the impending food crisis are: Can we produce enough of it to feed a growing population; can we do it in a sustainable way for both people and the planet; and can we change people’s habits surrounding food?
Brad McNamara, co-founder and CEO of Freight Farms, agrees there are multiple facets to our world’s food problems. In fact, the Needham native thinks the whole supply chain is a mess. He told us:
The problem is a really large one with so many different facets contributing it's nearly impossible to pick out the “biggest” single offender. Overall, it's not a problem of big areas of the food system being broken. The biggest issue is the that the entire system is outdated. The solution as we think about it is to modernize the entire system much the same way technology, design and data have modernized almost every other major industry. The future of food is more democratic, decentralized and data driven with the tools and community connections to allow more people to participate, make a living and feed the local community.
On the distribution side of the supply chain, other ventures in Greater Boston are doing their part to resolve food accessibility problems. For example, Lazoka is a platform that cuts out the middlemen, letting consumers order produce directly from local farmers. At the same time, startups like Spoiler Alert! and Gomango are working on spoilage prevention, so less food is wasted before it reaches consumers.
Even though companies in our tech community are confronting global food problems at different points in the supply chain, they all tend to agree that one solution won't solve all of our issues. For this reason, they support each others' efforts to reshape the food space, knowing that coming at it from multiple angles will be beneficial in the long run.
“We get most excited by any innovative solutions that empower more people to produce food locally and become part of the future food system," Freight Farms' McNamara wrote to us. "I get most excited by companies, technology and organizations that empower people to feed their community and improve their lives while doing so. I'm a big fan of the team at Cabbige, the work of Branchfood and City Growers/UFI.”
And then there's the last component local entrepreneurs believe is contributing to our world's food woes: we consumers.
“Food is going to arrive in individuals’ mouths eventually, so what they want is really important," Matt Weiss, managing director of the Food + Future coLab in Kendall Square, explained. "What we demand of our food has major ramifications that float all the way back to the supply chain...The issues could be tackled from different directions. It’s not just about, ‘Hey, we need to produce more of everything.’”
The coLab is a joint effort from Target, IDEO and the MIT Media Lab and its pushing participants to develop innovative ways to increase access, understanding and transparency throughout the food supply chain. Both Weiss and Indigo's David Perry said consumers should open their minds, examine their perceptions of food and be willing to change their diets to make the demands we place on our food supply chain less straining.
“I think we can see an example of that with insect proteins," Weiss explained. "We’re starting to understand that animal farming isn’t a sustainable option. Insect farming could meet some of the needs there, but, unlike other parts of the world, we have a problem eating insects in the U.S….There has to be a conversation on the consumer end about where we should plug in these innovations.”
Nick DuPey, design directer at IDEO who's also involved in the coLab, pointed to local startup Six Foods, which makes chips from cricket flour, and hypothesized that Western consumers might not widely embrace these insect-heavy food products just yet because they don't fully understand the perks. “I suspect they might go through growing pains and have to think about how they can get beyond being a novelty to make a long-lasting impact,” DuPey said.
