An evening for the digitalisation of the food industry
On October 1st we were invited by the Wirtschaftsförderung Mönchengladbach, the FoodHub NRW and the digihub Düsseldorf/Rheinland to the FoodTech Innovation Night in Mönchengladbach. At this event startups, universities and companies were offered a stage to present their digital innovations for the food industry. The Textilakademie NRW on the campus of the Hochschule Niederrhein offered a great setting for the event and was perfectly rounded off by a very tasty buffet from Green Window.
The 180 registered guests of the evening were offered an interesting and varied program. After a few warm words of welcome by the organizers, the evening was opened by Fabio Ziemßen of NX Food – Hub of Metro AG für Food-Innovation und Food-Technology. In his keynote speech “The Next Generation of FoodBiz” Ziemßen reported on the future challenges in the food industry and how these can be met with the help of technology.
The Innovation Pitches
After the exciting and inspiring presentation, the pitch competition was opened. A total of 7 startups, companies and scientists from the industry took part in the contest to present their ideas and innovations. At the end of the Innovation Pitches, it was then in the hands of the audience to evaluate the pitches by app.
It was not easy for the audience to choose the best pitch that evening. The topics on this evening were wide-ranging:
IBM and the Hochschule Niederrhein presented a blockchain-based technology that increases transparency about the origin and content of food. Also from the Hochschule Niederrhein a software for life cycle assessment was presented, with which the environmental impacts along the entire value chain can be determined. The start-up AridGreen Technologies presented a solution for the smart organic cultivation of food using sensors and artificial intelligence. Elopak, a supplier of paper-based packaging solutions for liquid foods, introduced a solution to support service technicians with Smart Glasses. Leroma, another start-up, presented a digital food raw materials exchange. The B2B platform serves as a marketplace for commodity traders and food producers and is also intended to reduce the waste of food through a surplus exchange.
Artificial intelligence in quality assurance
For the first time Dominik took the stage for sentin and presented our software solution sentin.ai vision. Following the slogan of the evening “Food meets Digital”, he showed the audience how the potentials of artificial intelligence can be used to make quality assurance in the food industry cheaper, faster and more accurate by using chocolate chip cookies as an example.
With his performance Dominik won the favour of the audience and prevailed with 85% of the audience votes against the other 6 participants.
Even without the victory on stage, the FoodTech Innovation Night would have been an all-round successful event for us. The evening offered an excellent opportunity to make many new contacts with representatives from the food industry. This enabled us to hold many exciting discussions and gather information from the industry on the topics of artificial intelligence and industrial image processing.
A successful event
Once again a big thank you to digihub, Wirtschaftsförderung Mönchengladbach and FoodHub NRW for organizing a great evening, not only from our point of view.
Click here for more articles on the FoodTech Innovation Night:
RP online – Die Zukunft des Essens ist digital
digihub Blog – Die Zukunft schmeckt digital
How can an examination be performed digitally?
sentin GmbH develops and distributes visual inspection systems based on artificial intelligence for industrial use. Lift your quality control to the next level – learn more about a sentin VISION system here.
