Emerging Trends: The Future of Food
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With the world population projected to reach 8.5B people in 2030 by the UN from today's population of 7.3B, a crop of foodtech startups and technologies are under development to tackle this immense challenge of feeding such a huge population. This challenge is further exasperated by the decline of clean accessible water and depletion of nutrients in crop soils global. Several technology trends are arising to tackle this challenge in different ways.
Indoor Farming
This set of technologies is based on increasing crop density and yield by having perfect control of growing conditions (humidity, lighting, air composition) as well as making use of vertical farming. The idea, which has yet to be proven economically viable, is to reduce waste of the inputs (i.e. fertilizer, water, energy, etc) while dramatically increasing the speed of crop growth and completely eliminating plant diseases and rot. More crops more quickly for less cost then current methods is the goal. The poster child for this set of technologies is startup Plenty which is backed by a number of big name and deep-pocketed investors. They advertise yields up to 350 times conventional farming techniques with only 1% of the water.
New Methods of Producing Meat
It is well documented that cattle rearing for the world's ever growing hunger for meat products is horribly inefficient and damaging to the environment releasing high amounts of greenhouse gases. A number of startups have arisen over the last few years seeking to grow artificial meat from cells in a lab environment. Of these the one that has received the most press and funding is San Francisco based Memphis Meats. The technology here is basically to use animal stem cells and bioreactors to grow meats in a lab setting that is indistinguishable from the traditionally raised and processed meat we eat daily. It's a much more complex scientific challenge than it initially sounds. The advantage is it likely will be much faster, cheaper and efficient pound for pound to produce any type of meat once the technology is developed and scaled.
Farm 2.0 - The Digital Farm
There are a ton of startups focused on improving traditional farming with everything from using drones and software to analyze crops in the field (i.e. Farmers Edge), robotics to replace human workers, software to better manage farm operations (AgCode), and many other areas. While not as likely as the above two categories to dramatically increase food yields, this is a much faster to implement and less difficult set of technologies to bring to market. In a word the Digital Farm is a sustaining set of technologies rather than a revolutionary set of technologies.
