Deadline: 6-Jan-25

The Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) and the Seeding the Future Foundation are calling on all scientists, engineers, innovators, entrepreneurs, and multidisciplinary teams from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), non-profits, social enterprises, universities, research institutions as well as small and emerging for-profit enterprises to submit game-changing innovations that will help transform the food system.

The goal of the Seeding The Future Global Food System Challenge is to inspire and support innovative, diverse, and multidisciplinary teams to create game-changing innovations that will help transform the food system.

Focus Areas

• Empower Conscious Consumer Choices
• Sustainable Regenerative Practices
• Safe, Nutritious Food for a Healthy Diet

Mission

• Seeding The Future’s Mission is to seed and support impactful initiatives and organizations that create and accelerate the pace of innovations that help transform food systems to become more nutritious, regenerative, and equitable for everyone in alignment with the overall vision.

Vision

• Seeding The Future’s vision is a global food system that always provides equitable access to safe, nutritious, trusted, affordable and appealing food for everyone and improves the health of people and the planet by being sustainable, resilient, and regenerative. The moonshot goal is to positively impact the lives of one billion people.

Funding Information

The Seeding The Future Global Food System Challenge will provide monetary awards in the form of grants and prizes totalling up to one million US dollars annually.

• Seed Grants ($25,000 each)
• Growth Grants ($100,000 each)
• Seeding The Future Grand Prizes ($250,000 each)

Eligibility Criteria 

• To be eligible for an award, the project must be innovative, impactful and lead to new advances that benefit at least one but ideally more than one of the intersecting domains of the Innovation Focus Area, while not negatively affecting any of the other domains. Innovations that benefit two or more domains and are at an advanced development stage are eligible for the highest award levels. The definition of Innovation in the context of this challenge is: A novel idea, approach, concept or technology that is practicable and leads to a significant beneficial for people or the environment.
• The following organizations are eligible to compete in the Challenge:
  • Non-profits located in any country
  • Academic or research institutions located in any country
  • Early stage or emerging for-profit companies located in any country
• Note: Excluded are countries or territories against which the U.S. maintains comprehensive sanctions (currently, Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and the Crimea, Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic Regions of Ukraine).
• Individuals are not eligible to apply.

Ineligibility Criteria

• They won’t fund:
  • Projects that have a negative effect on either the safety or healthfulness of food, the sustainability of the food supply chain or, that are unlikely to be accepted by the end-user or consumer
  • Theoretical concepts or ideas without any experiments or a reduction to practice
  • Individual persons
  • Projects where funds will be used to support large for-profit entities in their commercial activities such as R&D, Innovation, Manufacturing or Sales/Marketing
  • Initiatives which are not scalable beyond the initial project scope and have limited projected impact over time
  • Projects associated with political campaigns or lobbying
  • Capital campaigns

For more information, visit IFT.