Tag: Food

Taking mushrooms straight from the parking lot into the kitchen is a practical solution. Along similar lines, a startup in the Vancouver area is currently developing a stand-alone smart system for vertical farming planned as franchise. Its USP? The fact that it’s for small buildings specifically and helps owners grow fruit, vegetables and herbs in their underused spaces such...

People can grow sustainable vegetables from their sofas and know exactly where they come from. The same cannot be said for supermarket-bought food, even organic produce. Which is why an Argentinian startup is developing solutions to verify the agricultural supply chain’s sustainability. First, NASA images of the production area are analysed. This helps determine whether areas were created through...

Records from sugarcane are good for the environment. Chocolate, meanwhile, is good for our mood - even if too much sugar is unhealthy. But who said sugar was necessary to make chocolate? A Zurich-based research team dried the fibre-rich innermost layer of the cocoa hull - called the endocarp - and ground it to powder. Next the pulp from...

In Italy, tomatoes have a life after dinner. Chocolate is another cherished Italian staple. Yet, instead of using cocoa, a regional startup began looking to carob for a more sustainable alternative. Sweet and high-in-fibre, the legume also works against free radicals in the body. The carob tree thrives in the dry, southern Italian climate. If used, 2,400 litres of...

Sustainable background music makes most things easier. Even cleaning. And it could be better yet. A Belgian startup is using spent cooking oil and food waste to produce environmentally-friendly cleaning products. With the help of yeast organisms isolated from bumble bee honey, potato peel and vegetable scraps from the supermarket are fermented in a patented process. The resulting biosurfactants...

Beer can be brewed from industrial wastewater. Now a research team from Singapore is using the wastewater from soybean production to create sustainable feed for fish farming. Usually, feed is made from wild-caught fish (sometimes very wild-caught indeed!). The team cultivated a single-cell protein in a bioreactor over four months at 30°C using the protein-rich wastewater and the micro-organisms...

In future, circuit boards for PCs could be made from mushrooms. Now, an EU-financed research team is attempting something even more daring. They are building components for mobile machines from edible materials. People in remote places could be given drones for dessert while other drones deliver vaccinations to endangered animals. Work is already underway to create a sprayable sensor...

Insoles with fungal spores help prevent bacteria and foot diseases. Now a Canadian-based startup is also using mushroom spores - to produce large quantities of protein-rich, plant-based food. First step: extract the sugar from agricultural waste. The sugar serves as nourishment for a teaspoonful of spores from different edible mushrooms, which are then fermented in large steel tanks. Next,...