Dr Dragana Vukasinovic is a passionate life scientist with expertise in Crop Protection Science & Food Security. She is a Founder and CEO of Fauna Smart Technologies, creating innovations based on academic findings.
She believes solving complex environmental problems will come from life scientists stepping out and creating ventures, and driving them as Founders. With this end in mind and together with other entrepreneurial scientists she is developing the Entrepreneurial Scientists European Platform (ESEP).
Keynote title: Entrepreneurial Scientist – the European version.
Short descriptions of the startups pitching at the event, with focus on the sustainability challenge they are working on solving.
Field: Agriculture / Agritech.
The sustainability challenge and our solution: Arctic Farming is trying to solve the two biggest issues that HoReCa and food retail operators have with fresh produce – the high volatility in their quality and price. Our automated vertical farming modules enable HoReCa and food retail operators to grow their own fresh herbs, salads and berries on location regardless of the time of year. The technology is not only efficient and small in its footprint but also easy and cheap to use.
How we create sustainable & social impact: By accelerating public sustainability policies and Food System transformation with direct impact on SDGs 2, 8, 9, 12 and 13, and indirect impact on SDGs 1, 6, 11, 15 and 17.
Startup stage: Ready product & First customers.
Field: Agriculture / Agritech
The sustainability challenge and our solution: With climate change and current world crises, our food, food production is struggling: soils are decreasing in productivity and no one really knows why that is. Agricultural equipment companies thus have a hard time knowing what to manufacture for their customers to cope with these difficulties. With the help of our simulation chamber, we study the behaviour of the soils of fields under different climate conditions to know how the soil is likely to behave in the future. Thus, we are able to know what is going to be needed in our customers' customers' farms in the future.
How we create sustainable & social impact: Environmental and social sustainability is at the core of our business: we help local food production by strengthening the local agriculture. We also promote a responsible use of resources to avoid economic and environmental impacts by e.g. optimizing fertilizer usage or maximizing CO2 absorption.
Startup stage: Prototype.
Field: Sustainability measurement and tracking services
The sustainability challenge and our solution: Food brands are facing growing pressure to report on and manage the climate impact of their products. Carbon footprint calculation has traditionally been too expensive and complicated for most food brands.Biocode is the carbon footprint calculator for food brands, producers and farmers. It's an easy tool for tackling the reporting chaos and clearly communicating your environmental values to customers.
How we create sustainable & social impact: Biocode helps food brands manage and lower the carbon footprint of their products across supply chains all the way from individual field plots to end-products at retailers. By making carbon footprint calculation accessible to all companies, small and large, we can more effectively reduce emissions.
Startup stage: Ready product & First customers.
Field: Circular Economy.
The sustainability challenge and our solution: We produce sustainable, competitively priced, highly functional protein ingredients to replace and supplement traditional proteins such as animal proteins and soy. We produce PEKILO mycoprotein using our proprietary fermentation process. The core technology was developed in Finland already in the 1970s, and at eniferBio we've brought it back to life. The process allows the upcycling of diverse side streams into sustainable protein ingredients.
How we create sustainable & social impact: By providing sustainable protein.
Startup stage: MVP (minimum viable product).
Field: Sustainability measurement and tracking services
The sustainability challenge and our solution: We help companies acquire in-house resources to do Environmental Life Cycle Assessments and in that way 1. Find out the biggest drivers of their environmental impacts and 2. Focus on the most effective improvement actions. Our package includes: Recruitment, 2 week LCA education, LCA project support for 8 weeks and all needed tools.
How we create sustainable & social impact: By helping companies reduce their environmental impact.
Startup stage: Ready product & First customers.
Field: Agriculture / Agritech
The sustainability challenge and our solution: The newest EU regulations and strategies are banning chemical pesticides and this is forcing over 10.5 million farmers to transition to biopesticides and biological crop protection products. This is challenging and calls for cross-disciplinary science-based innovation. Fauna Smart Technologies is leveraging life science knowledge (near)real-time and in-field, using diverse technologies, to help horticulture growers transition safely to greener practices. We have designed the Pest Risk Map using satellite imagery and changed the perception of the ground-truth to maximize digitalization potential in the horticultural ecosystem. We see a huge potential of this application to Forestry.
How we create sustainable & social impact: We are directly addressing the Biosphere, the core where our society and economy is built upon. Through environmental impact we are providing social and economic impact i.e., the triple bottom line.
Startup stage: MVP (minimum viable product).
Field: Food.
The sustainability challenge and our solution: We are creating healthy dog food supplements from upscaled waste vegetables & brewers spent grain. We're also creating cultivated meat raw food for dogs.
How we create sustainable & social impact: By improving dogs' microbiome and longevity / quality of life, decreasing food waste and helping breweries.
Startup stage: Ready product & First customers.
Field: Food
The sustainability challenge and our solution: The global diabetes epidemic is a massive health challenge. We invented a natural sweetener that can replace sugar in ice creams, soft-drinks and syrups.
How we create sustainable & social impact: Our solution supports SDG 3: Good Health & Well-being.
Startup stage: Prototype.
Field: Food
The sustainability challenge and our solution: Eating more plant-based is the single most effective way to reduce carbon footprint on an individual level. Kids will eat more plant-based in the future if they get used to the taste early and often but parent's have no idea how to do it. We provide a 100% plant-based food innovation for kids backed by a planet-friendly parenting tech platform.
How we create sustainable & social impact: By helping to raise a healthy, planet-friendly generation that is consuming our planet as little as possible.
Startup stage: Ready product & First customers.
Field: Circular Economy
The sustainability challenge and our solution: LignoSphere is replacing fossil materials with bio-based ones, i.e. lignin, an underutilized side-stream from the forest product industry. The first products are a coating and and adhesive, and both are 100% bio-based and have great performance. With our patented technology we transform lignin into an easily usable form, which further can be made into value-added products. In other words, we take a bio side-stream that is seen as wasted today and use it to replace petrochemicals in different materials.
How we create sustainable & social impact: We provide bio-based materials with the same (or better) performance and price as traditional petrochemical products, and thus allowing for the transition into a circular bio-economy.
Startup stage: Prototype.
Field: Circular Economy
The sustainability challenge and our solution: Laboratory testing services are difficult to buy due to extremely fragmented market. Measurlabs provides all testing services from the same place.
How we create sustainable & social impact: By bringing testing services available, we enable efficient product development and quality control for companies developing noveld sustainable technologies and products.
Startup stage: Ready product & First customers.
Field: Food
The sustainability challenge and our solution: MOLT FoodTech offers tools for ecological transition of eating by creating plant based mold flavor solutions for both food industry and eco-aware consumers. The worst bottleneck in switching into more ecological diets in the western world is the lack of good quality plant based delicacy products. We bring plant based molded cheese flavor available for foodies, restaurants, food industry and fast food industry.
How we create sustainable & social impact: MOLT FoodTech offers tools for consumers' transition into more ecological diets.
Startup stage: Ready product & First customers.
Field: Circular Economy
The sustainability challenge and our solution: There is need for renewable materials, replacing oil based chemicals and avoiding CO2. We use sidestreams from bio-industry to develop biopolymers for various uses as fine chemicals, as functional ingredients, even potential as food ingredients.
How we create sustainable & social impact: By reducing CO2 with avoiding oil based chemicals, by valorizing raw materials that otherwise are combusted for energy, by enabling industrial startup-ecosystem to thrive in Finland, and by transitioning towards biobased economy.
Startup stage: Ready product & First customers.
Field: Food
The sustainability challenge and our solution: We prevent food waste by upcycling brewer’s spent grain into delicious fiber rich snacks for consumers.
How we create sustainable & social impact: We tackle SDG 12.3 - halving food waste by 2030 by reusing side streams from drink industry. We also want to apply for B-corp status to be transparent in all of our sustainability and social impact actions.
Startup stage: MVP (minimum viable product).
Field: Food
The sustainability challenge and our solution: Almost 14% of edible food is thrown away before it even reaches the stores. This equates to billions of tons of food each year. The Nordic Umami Company creates value from the plant-based portion of this food by turning it into delicious products with the savoury umami flavour that people want. We have developed a natural way of using fermentation technology to create plant-based umami from food industry side products.
How we create sustainable & social impact: We develop circular food systems that reduce emissions, while also extracting the taste that will attract more people to plant-based eating.
Startup stage: Ready product & First customers
Field: Food
The sustainability challenge and our solution: LUST: Fat - the elementary fuel for our body and the magic behind mouth watering taste of our favorite foods. REMORSE: Current animal/dairy, palm and coconut based fats are killing our and planet's health. BAND-AID: Cultured fats can solve only the latter. SALVATION: Oleoflow solves both! Our tech gives any healthy liquid oil a structure of solid fat that we as consumers and the food technology are craving for. It's not chemistry, the underlaying oil and its nutritional values stay untouched! Oleoflow is born from unique research marriage of food science and material physics from University of Helsinki.
How we create sustainable & social impact: We enable food industry to shift from usage of animal and tropical oils into sustainable sources, and to bring healthiness into our food products on the way - without us needing to compromise what we love to eat.
Startup stage: MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
Field: Food & Circular Economy
The sustainability challenge and our solution: Due to eutrophication of the oceans, algae blooms are an annual recurring phenomena around the world. Though mostly invasive, algae are a valuable resource as they are filled with nature’s building blocks and provide an endless pool of sustainable, bio-based ingredients for various applications. Origin by Ocean is building a business ecosystem based on farmed and wild harvested invasive algae as the feedstock, which we turn into functional ingredients that are used in the production of everyday consumer goods.
How we create sustainable & social impact: By removing nutrients from the oceans, easing nutrient load; Valorizing biomass accumulated by invasive species; Providing ecological, functional and sustainable ingredients for decarbonisation of consumer goods; Empowering local algae harvesters and farmers; and by creating value on the coasts.
Startup stage: Ready product & First customers
Field: Circular Economy
The sustainability challenge and our solution: There is a need to reduce carbon footprint and environmental impacts of building and construction sector. We offer zero carbon reuse-products for sustainable construction, including innovative design and ecologic architechture.
How we create sustainable & social impact: By providing environmentally friendly products and solutions for buildings, renovations and material reuse. Real choice instead of new product with great soul and story, which helps companies to do marketing and core business with pure heart!
Startup stage: Ready product & First customers