Last month, a child born in the Dominican Republic was credited with being the eighth billionth person on Earth. This major population milestone was reached only 11 years after the planet’s population ticked past seven billion, and the 10 billionth person is expected to be born sometime around 2050.

That’s a lot of mouths to feed. The United Nations has forecasted that farmers will have to produce 70 per cent more food by 2050 to meet the needs of the world’s growing population.

While planet Earth has been a great provider to human beings, there are limits as to how much it can give. Large-scale food production is already responsible for nearly a third of carbon emissions, and 90 per cent of deforestation as natural ecosystems are converted into farmland.

The environment isn’t the only issue confronting food security for future generations. As the war in Ukraine – which disrupted supplies of feedstock and grains to Asia, Europe, and Africa – has shown, food supplies and production are highly vulnerable to geopolitical events.

Food tech takes centre stage

Technology has revolutionised our understanding of how genomic sequencing can produce more resistant and higher-yield crops and has driven huge advances in alternative foods, such as plant-based analogues and cultivated protein.

Also Read: The opportunities and challenges Singapore’s agritech sector faces

Singapore, the city-state which I call home, has positioned itself to be at the centre of research and commercialisation of these novel foods. As a country with little arable land and which imports as much as 90 per cent of the food its population consumes, it has set an ambitious goal of sustainably producing 30 per cent of its nutritional needs by 2030.

At Nurasa, we are similarly focused on accelerating the commercialisation and adoption of sustainable foods across Asia. We work closely with industry partners and promising food tech startups to ensure that the taste, texture, nutritional value, and price of these sustainable options match consumer demands. Simply put, we all want to eat food that excites us.

But while creating amazing, tasty, and affordable products is a necessary first step to enticing consumers and establishing and growing market share, it is not enough. As some of our most innovative food producers are discovering, there are significant barriers to bringing sustainable food products to market.

Barriers to scaling and commercialising new foods exist

Emerging players need to scale up to place these products in the hands of consumers to disrupt the status quo. Alternative food producers are still first-movers in the use of equipment such as precision fermentation and high-moisture extrusion (HME) to create food analogues. However, in most cases,  the infrastructure for such innovative technologies is prohibitively expensive in order for these emerging food producers to scale up to commercial volumes.

Alternative food producers also face limited access to capital to commercialise their products. Although the sector was estimated to be worth US$1 trillion by 2050, consumer adoption has not been as robust as predicted.

Consequently, investor confidence has fallen, despite growing eagerness to direct capital towards opportunities that contribute to a more sustainable world. Until the alternative protein sector is able to drive mainstream adoption, the challenge of fundraising will remain.

To overcome the core obstacle hampering growth, we need to win consumers over on flavour, texture and nutritional quality and encourage them to appreciate alternative proteins as real food options.

Subsequently, as producers make further improvements and create more food applications and opportunities for consumers to integrate these products into their daily diets, we anticipate a significant shift in habits. Making this a reality will require innovations in product development and formulations,  and emerging startups lacking the relevant technical expertise and capacity will need to rely on support from the broader ecosystem to fill existing gaps and capture demand.

Offering tailored support to scale startups

It’s a critical time for sustainable foods, especially following the conclusion of COP27 negotiations, where food security featured prominently. Without question, the global event has put building a more robust food system on the radar of leaders – but there is still significant work to be done to identify more ethical and environmental ways of production.

New ideas and innovations, such as alternative foods, offer us the opportunity to improve resilience and tackle the effects of climate change. However, as with any nascent industry, challenges remain. Overcoming those will require concerted action through partnerships at every step of the commercialisation journey.

This is why Nurasa, A*STAR’s Singapore Institute of Food and Biotechnology Innovation (SIFBI) and Trendlines Agrifood Innovation Centre (AFIC) have launched the inaugural Food Tech Startup Challenge with the support of Enterprise Singapore.

Also Read: 4 ways you can capitalise on the food tech gold rush in Asia

Currently open for submissions, the challenge calls on entrepreneurs from anywhere in the world, specialising in either the optimisation of alternative proteins – especially through precision fermentation and HME – or the creation of next-generation healthy and tasty functional foods and novel product formats, to participate.

Of particular interest will be how alternative protein startups overcome the key issues of existing plant-based meat: taste, texture, nutrition, and price.

The winners of the challenge will be awarded, among other prizes and incentives, early access to cutting-edge technologies and tools at Nurasa’s Food Tech Innovation Centre as well as the opportunity to work closely with industry leaders to scale up the development of their novel, animal-free food products to the pre-commercialisation stage.

For entrepreneurs keen to crack the Asian market, this challenge is the ideal platform from which they can gain a foothold in the fastest-growing and largest food markets in the world.

At Nurasa, we’re looking forward to helping food innovators explore creative solutions that can lift the barriers to the adoption of alternative foods in this region. From the groundbreaking solutions we’ve seen so far, the future is healthy and delicious – and, more importantly, sustainable.

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