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The agrifood market is competitive and dynamic. It is currently led by technology developments and changing consumer attitudes. To succeed and drive European agribusiness innovation forward, emerging and advanced technologies need to be embraced. Start-ups and SMEs have a lot to offer but successful entry to the agrifood value chain is a challenge.
The EU-funded KATANA project has enabled new European tech-based agrifood products and services to be launched and has helped to ensure their ongoing success. Acting as business accelerator, KATANA, provided selected SMEs and start-ups with grants, training, support, and opportunities to develop their ideas and create new products or services.
It has brought farmers, food producers, and technologists together, to create consortia addressing pressing needs in agrifood, ICT and emerging industries ¬– eco-industries, mobile services and personalised health, for example.
“For the first time, KATANA used crowdfunding to enable the market to select the agribusinesses with the most potential,” says project coordinator Alexandra Rudl of bwcon GmbH in Stuttgart, Germany. “Companies raised almost EUR 1 million of funds and 10 businesses were successfully launched.”
Crowdfunding for agrifood innovation
In a first phase, more than 500 SMEs, start-ups and individual entrepreneurs from 28 countries applied by submitting video pitches. The top 100 applicants received a grant of EUR 2 000 each, and access to training, an onsite boot camp and online matchmaking that paired them with potential collaborators from across the EU.
KATANA played a key role in getting the technology and agriculture sectors to work together in synergy. This led to the formation of consortia that aimed to create innovative products or services in three areas: precision agriculture for sustainable farming; mobile services for accessing agrifood markets and the Internet of Things (IoT); and functional foods for personalised nutrition.
In the second phase of the project, crowdfunding campaigns were launched to identify the 10 most successful consortia in terms of market attractiveness and performance. Each of KATANA’s top 10 teams then received an additional EUR 100 000 to develop and launch their businesses.
By the second phase of the project, 54 consortia from 13 countries moved on to another round of crowdfunding. Close to 2 000 backers helped the consortia raise more than EUR 1 million. Throughout the project, KATANA will distribute an additional EUR 1.2 million to European start-ups and SMEs.
New tech for agribusiness success
“KATANA provides a unique environment to develop tech options in the agrifood sector. It creates an ecosystem connecting stakeholders from across Europe and provides key services to help develop innovation,” explains Rudl.
KATANA’s group of top 10 consortia have created products and services within the agrifood fields set out by the project. These include a company that provides state-of-the-art precision agricultural solutions to assist farmers. Another is developing smart food packaging to reduce food and packaging waste. One of the companies is developing sustainable protein-rich foods from insects.
The project continues to provide ongoing support for the development of future innovation in the form of three free-of-charge online technology platforms. PRAGMATIC (pragmatic-net.eu) is a one-stop shop platform to connect the farming industry with precision agriculture solutions from startups or SMEs from around Europe and the world.
The Funfood toolbox (funfood.site) is a cloud platform with information for designing functional food. The platform covers information for over 3 000 functional products and about 1 000 food recipes.
The KATANA Store (katanastore.eu) is an Internet of Things platform that allows agribusiness retailers, food manufacturers and food producers to setup online storefronts and sell their goods or services via connected devices.
Above all, the project demonstrates an innovative approach to funding allocation through crowdfunding which has led to successful business support and increased agrifood innovation worldwide.