The Kitchen of Tomorrow is: Open
Once again hackers, designers and food scientists got together to hack for a better food system: with less waste, easier choices and more climate awareness.
Let’s collaborate to make our kitchens more convenient & sustainable
This was the main aspiration at the “Open Food Data x Smart Kitchen” Hackdays organised by V-Zug and Opendata.ch at Zugorama in Zug last weekend. A diverse pool of experts were invited to develop new prototypes with open resources (such as recipe datasets and oven APIs) and relevant challenges. This cross-sectoral event was enabled in partnership with SIX Payment Services, Nestlé, the city of Zug, Hochschule Luzern, GateB and Milani.
Beat Sidler from V-Zug believes that collaboration and openness will take on a more relevant role in the future:
“The future of cooking won’t be invented by us alone, ideas and contributions need to come from everywhere. It was inspirational to see participants develop the kitchen of their dreams based on our recipe data and accessible ovens.”
Thomas Buerki, co-founder of the startup DigiMeals, agrees:
“Our Open Recipe API was used for various projects during the Hackdays. Participants created really exciting solutions to address challenges in the food space and provided us with invaluable input for the development and improvement of our API and the data behind it.”
Solving food waste & climate change in 48 hours
As always, it was astonishing to see how many projects come to life over a weekend with motivated people, open resources and a hard deadline! Andrew, a Master student in Environmental Economics from the UK, agrees:
“I met an incredible bunch of engineers and designers who were able to produce tangible products within a seemingly impossible timeframe. Every single team was working until the last seconds of the allotted time.”
The goal to fight food waste and enable a more sustainable food system was prevalent for many teams, as the following examples of projects developed at the Hackdays illustrate:
- Forgetting food in the fridge is a common cause of foodwaste. BEAT reminds you before your food expires and provides you with recipe-recommendations based on your inventory. Beat the Foodwaste!
- With Food Matters ingredients left-overs from recipes will be a problem of the past: the app allows you to easily figure out a cooking plan over a specific time frame that uses all the ingredients you bought.
- EatInDer is an app for all the Eaters tired of searching for the right meal and restaurant. Get a search boost if you specialise in a certain category, understand demand – and get to the right place and time without the costs of market research.
2 winners will get closer to your kitchen
To make sure that the feast isn’t over after the weekend, Opendata.ch, V-Zug and SIX selected two winners that will receive further support over the next six months. Both aim to reduce food waste:
Food Matters was selected by the jury to receive a 6 months incubation with coaching, networking and financing. As a second winner, BEAT will get consultation and support through incubation workshops. If they continue developing their project as fast as last weekend, they will soon help us master our food and waste.
Newsletter:
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Link to the open food data program:
https://food.opendata.ch/#hackdays
