From today, the app will be live in Dunedin and will offer consumers a variety of food to ‘rescue’ before it is thrown out by offering it at 50 percent the usual price. The food can be ordered and bought in-app, then collected directly from the eateries that are on board.

“Dunedin has a vibrant food scene, love of cafe culture and a strong student population who are leading the charge on sustainability – so we think it’s a perfect fit for Foodprint,” Garvey says. “We have been able to launch here thanks to the support we have received from Dunedin City Council’s Good Food Coordinator, Ruth Zeinert.”

Some of the cafes on board include Precinct Food, Market Kitchen, Watson’s Eatery, Project Wellness, Zoo Café and more. They join more than 250 eateries in Auckland who have been using the Foodprint platform for the last few months.

More than 20,000 users have been using the app in Auckland to buy surplus food items that include sushi, salads, sandwiches and even cakes.

Foodprint has also been tracking how much carbon dioxide has been saved by its efforts to reduce food waste. So far, 18,000 kilograms of CO₂ equivalent emissions have been prevented by food being rescued through the app in the eight months since its launch.

“Foodprint is genius, it’s a beautiful and easy to use app which means we can get our delicious lovingly made food into someone’s tummy that previously would have ended up in the compost,” Little Bird founder Megan May says. “We waste less and it gives people access to food that might usually be out of their price range.”

Foodprint was the winner of the Idealog + Sprout Accelerator Transfarmation Competition, which awarded Garvey a place in Sprout’s 2020 Accelerator programme.

The judges described Foodprint as a “deceptively simple concept that proved attractive to price-conscious and waste-averse consumers.”

Check out its website here.

Last Wednesday, a bunch of innovators in the food production space descended on the almighty city of Palmerston North to pitch for their lives.

For the city slickers, Palmerston North is home to a lot of innovation happening in the agritech space. Massey University’s School of Agriculture and Environment is located here, as is The Factory, a former dairy factory that has now become a centre for research and innovation, helping nurture local companies and running programmes that look at the future of farming and of food production, like the Sprout Accelerator.

As part of Idealog and Sprout Accelerator’s Transfarmation competition, six finalists who’d met the competition brief of using indigenous methods or ingredients, using food waste in a creative way or creating a more sustainable form of packaging were flown in to pitch their idea in front of six judges – a nerve-wracking task by anyone’s standards.

Those finalists hailed from all around the country, from Auckland, to Wellington and Christchurch. The final six were Wrapt, Citizen, Foodprint, Reusabowl, Kelpn as People’s Choice winner (their entry had the most likes and comments on the Shuttlerock page) and the wildcard, K&R’s Wheatstraw breadclip.

Reusabowl

Reusabowl is a reusable food container system that is for consumers, but food retailers are the customers. The idea behind it is it to eliminate single-use food packaging through restaurants and cafes stocking the containers and users paying a deposit to lease the container when they purchase takeaway food. The deposit is then refunded to the user once the container is returned, operating on a trust system. A similar concept has already been introduced to the New Zealand market through Again Again, a reusable coffee cup system. Its co-founders described it as like a library book system – containers are used, then returned, washed and leased again to another customer. The food containers were pitched as being made of a durable bioplastic, but only a couple of prototypes had been made so far. The co-founders behind this idea are Marine Bucher, Sarah Booher and Bobby Lloyd.

Wrapt

Wrapt was the 2019 Transfarmation runner-up. It is a company that creates environmentally friendly edible food wraps that are made out of a secret recipe, which involves seaweed. It’s the creation of 16-year-old Brooke Moore, a self-confessed molecular gastronomy nerd who wanted to come up with an alternative to the plastics that harm the environment and are currently the go-to choice for consumers. Her products are already in market and Moore is building a profile for herself, having recently appeared on TVNZ’s Breakfast show and winning a 2019 Girlboss Innovation Award. There is also potential for her product to be expanded into the agriculture industry as an alternative to silage wraps and plastic bags that are used around the farm. As her product is edible, it will cause no harm to livestock if they were to consume it. In terms of what stage her company is at, Moore is due to meet with large corporates such as Glad and Zuru to discuss licensing her product out to them.

Citizen

Citizen is a company that has taken the circular economy to all new levels. Its plan is to collect food products past its display date from supermarkets and turn it into beverages with the help of industry partners. Citizen has not yet started production on its products, but it has been in talks with organisations such as Akina, Callaghan Innovation and the Food Bowl.

Foodprint
 

Foodprint was crowned the overall winner of our Transfarmation competition. It’s an app founded Michal Garvey that aims to reduce the 50,000 tonnes of food waste produced annually in New Zealand by cafes, restaurants and supermarkets. Eateries can sell surplus food that otherwise would’ve been chucked out and customers can score delicious meals at 50 percent the normal price, meaning a win-win for both parties. Garvey has had success in the five months she’s been running it, but now she’s at a point where she’d like some support to expand nationally. You can read our full interview with Garvey here.

Kelpn

Kelpn is a company that’s developing a soft plastic packaging alternative that is made out of kelp seaweed and 100 percent compostable, while also keeping the product it contains inside it, such as food, as fresh as conventional plastic packaging. It was our People’s Choice winner, receiving the most likes and shares out of the entries by the time the competition closed. The team has been experimenting with using different types of kelp that grow around New Zealand as a raw material which can then be turned into a kelp-based bioplastic and benefit the environment as a carbon sequestration tool. Its team is made up of Abel Goremusandu, Jack Holloway, Jaclyn Phillott and Mikaila Ceelen-Thomas.

K&R’s Wheatstraw Breadclip

K&R’s Wheatstraw Breadclip was the Wildcard finalist, and its innovation is in the title. The team has created a wheat-straw alternative to the humble bread clip, a small but not unimportant item many people interact with in their day to day lives. About one billion plastic bread clips are produced each year, equating to about 240 bread clips per person in New Zealand. K&R wanted to create a sustainable alternative to this wasteful, unnecessary piece of plastic. They have produced a prototype, but are yet to organise the logistics of developing this at scale.

The judging process

While everyone had very worthy ideas, some of the criteria for scoring by the judges was around leadership, ambition and their technical knowledge in the people and team, the size of the market and the competitive landscape, the product, its investment and resource allocation and product development stage, alongside their knowledge of IP and their competition fit, depending on how they met the Transfarmation brief and solved a global issue.

For Reusabowl, it was clear that the company is addressing a real issue in terms of single-use packaging. However, there was concerns expressed by the judges about how food safety would be managed, particularly when it comes to consumers being guaranteed the bowls are safe for food intolerances, such as a gluten intolerance. It would also be up to each food retailer to ensure the bowls are properly cleaned. Further clarity around what bioplastic and its durability to stains and other challenges was needed.

With Wrapt, there was a lot to like. Moore is a charismatic and confident founder who’d proven her product appeals to several demographics, such as parents who want alternatives to oil-based and non-recyclable food wraps for their children’s lunches. However, there were concerns around the IP of the Wrapt products, particularly now Moore is looking to partner with a bigger organisation, which may try reverse engineer her idea. The judges decided Wrapt was runner up of the competition and will be awarding her additional mentoring from specialists in packaging, food safety and business development.

Foodprint was the overall Transfarmation winner due to being a deceptively simple concept that proved attractive to price-conscious and waste-averse consumers. As summarised by Transfarmation judge Chelsea Millar: “As an entrepreneur, Michal showed a hunger to be solving an issue that is unfortunately, becoming a large global problem. She demonstrated good knowledge of her market, a desire to bring the right team together to execute her business plan (despite having a few hiccups already) and has produced a user experience that is receiving good feedback. Wrapping the Sprout team around her is going to allow her to really accelerate her business from the foundation she has already established. What impressed me the most was that she’s bootstrapped her idea from the start and being only in market for five months, she has already achieved a lot.”

With Kelpn, the judges agreed that the company addressed a real issue and had been making good progress developing its idea. However, it was very early stage there was not enough clarity provided in what products or markets it would be focusing on with its kelp-based bioplastic.  

When it came to Citizen, judges were impressed by the presentation and the originality of the idea: taking circular concepts and incorporating them into beer and bread production, two products New Zealanders consume a lot of. However, judges said high price points would be required to recompensate the energy and effort invested in this process. Citizen also was early stage and didn’t have proof of concept or prototypes as of yet.

With K&R’s Wheatstraw breadclip, the concept of using straw as a raw material was clever and though the bread clip is a niche product, it’s also most likely to be overlooked as a form of plastic waste worth changing, so the judges commended the team for thinking about this. However, the issue with this idea is that the product has to be sold at an extremely low price point in order to be profitable and competitive. It also will face issues in resonating with consumers as part of the plastic problem due to being a small detail – particularly if the bread bag is still made of plastic.

When it came to all of the finalists, one of the overarching issues affecting most of them was IP. Judges urged them to think more about protecting their ideas, as they could be easily recreated by a company with more resources at their fingertips and needed protecting. It came across as a bit of an afterthought or something put on the back burner rather than being a priority, when it needs to be put front and centre.

We encourage everyone to keep at developing their ideas, and get in touch with us at a later date – who knows, maybe you’ll feature in our Elevator Pitch section soon! If you’re interested in learning more about the Sprout Accelerator, you can head to their website. 

Thank you to all of the finalists who took time out of their day to come pitch, the judges for offering their expertise and Sprout Accelerator for being our partner in the search for the future of food production. And finally, congratulations to Michal Garvey from Foodprint – we look forward to seeing where you go next.  

After hundreds of people’s choice votes and many an entry on the competition’s Shuttlerock page, judges from both parties deliberated and narrowed it down to six finalists. All of their business ideas were diverse, and met the brief of using indigenous methods or ingredients, using food waste in a creative way or creating a more sustainable form of packaging.

The finalists gathered at The Factory in Palmerston North to pitch their idea in five minutes to the judges hailing from Fonterra, Sprout, Idealog, Massey University and Moreish.

The grand winner of the Transfarmation competition was named Michal Garvey, the founder and director of Foodprint. Garvey impressed the judges with her passionate five-minute pitch and her proof of concept, which is a great idea in need of some further wrap-around support.

Foodprint is an app that aims to reduce the 50,000 tonnes of food waste produced annually in New Zealand by cafes, restaurants and supermarkets.

Eateries can sell surplus food that otherwise would’ve been chucked out and customers can score delicious meals at 50 percent the normal price, meaning a win-win for both parties.

“The idea behind Foodprint is it’s an app that connects eateries that have surplus or imperfect food to purchase it for a discount, it’s all about keeping good perfectly edible food out of landfill,” Garvey says.

“Instead of seeing perfectly edible food be wasted that’s still totally edible, what we’re doing is connecting it with people who buy it and making sure it ends up in people’s bellies where it belongs and not landfill.”

Customers order and make their purchase in-app, then collect the food directly from the store. The platform also has features that show the user just how much impact they’re making through their purchasing choices.

“With the app, you can start following your favourite eateries and that means you’ll get a notification when they’ve got food available to buy,” Garvey says. “Some of the food goes really quick – like in a couple of seconds – so notifications play a big part there. The app also tracks for you how much carbon you’ve saved, as well as how much money you’ve saved and how much food you’ve saved by weight.”

The Foodprint app has been up-and-running for just over five months, with about 250 eateries using the platform so far, including &Sushi, Ripe Deli, The Caker and Revive Café. However, the effort has been mostly a solo mission by Garvey, who is now hitting a few growing pains.

She’s eager to use her Transfarmation win and place in the 2020 Sprout accelerator to further grow her business and expand Foodprint nationally beyond just Auckland.

“I am totally in shock about winning, I think I’m still shaking a little bit,” Garvey says.

“I’m super excited. I thought all of the other businesses here today were so amazing and it was really cool to meet some of the people I’d read about and been following on social media. I didn’t think I was going to be the top gun.

“I’m super excited about being part of this accelerator and I think it will help Foodprint scale to the next level and have Foodprint go into other New Zealand cities, as at the moment, we’re only in Auckland.”

Transfarmation judge and organiser Chelsea Millar, who is the lead for attraction strategy for Sprout Accelerator, as well as the founder and CEO of Grass Roots Media, says as an entrepreneur, says Garvey demonstrated a tenacity that proved she is exactly the kind of person Sprout wants to work with.

“As an entrepreneur, Michal showed a hunger to be solving an issue that is unfortunately, becoming a large global problem,” Millar says.

“She demonstrated good knowledge of her market, a desire to bring the right team together to execute her business plan (despite having a few hiccups already) and has produced a user experience that is receiving good feedback. Wrapping the Sprout team around her is going to allow her to really accelerate her business from the foundation she has already established.

“What impressed me the most was that she’s bootstrapped her idea from the start and being only in market for five months, she has already achieved a lot.”

Garvey says there’s no one else in New Zealand doing what Foodprint is doing, but in terms of competition, there is a bit of crossover with other delivery services in the digital space, as well as charities that work to redirect food to people in need.

“While we’re not in direct competition with them, we’re aware of them and wanting to work together to make sure food is going where it’s needed,” Garvey says.

As well as this, she says a key difference with Foodprint is unlike Uber Eats and the rise of getting food delivered to eat at home, it drives people back into cafes and restaurants in person, all for a good cause.

The idea for Foodprint came about through a culmination of experiences Garvey had in her twenties. While working at a ski resort in Colorado, USA, she says she was in shock at the amount of food that went to waste after each buffet breakfast.

“Some days, we’d literally throw out as much food as what had been eaten in the buffets, and so I think this was where I started to see food waste as an issue, as I was seeing it right in front of my own eyes,” she says.

“I always thought it was really mad, but my colleagues were like, ‘Oh no, it’s fine, it’s what we do’.”

She also spent further time abroad working Hellofresh in London for a few years, where she was exposed to the intersection of food and technology.

“There was where I started to see the place technology has in how we’re sourcing, purchasing and consuming our food, so this combination as well as looking at what’s happening overseas in Europe helped me formulate Foodprint,” she says.

Overall, Garvey says she hopes Foodprint can change people’s perceptions of food waste.

“The biggest thing is reducing the amount of edible food waste going to landfill and it’s about connecting people with where their food has come from in terms of sending them back into the eateries,” Garvey says.

“I’m hoping to raise awareness that food waste is a massive issue, is a huge contributor to climate change and something we can quite easily change.”

Fast facts about food waste

• One-third of food produced for human consumption is wasted.
• The food sector is the third largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, behind only China and the USA.
• In New Zealand, 157,389 tonnes of food is thrown away each year by households.
• 47,678 tonnes of food is thrown away by cafés, restaurants and supermarkets.
• The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals call for countries to halve food waste by 2030 – specifically, SDG 12: Responsible Production and Consumption.
• The convenience food trend is growing in popularity, with the Restaurant Association reporting the takeaway/to go sector experienced the highest industry growth in 2018 of 5.75 percent.

Good looking, yes, highly nutritious, definitely – but worth the price listed at the supermarket? He wasn’t convinced.

So with no background in horticulture, he decided to grow his own and quickly discovered why people paid the premium.

“You have to water them every day, the lifecycle is so short it’s about a week or two weeks, you constantly have to harvest them and when you harvest them you have to get rid of the soil and start again.”

Xu, who has a background in structural engineering, says he was determined to see if he could make that process easier and got stuck into research on hydroponics.

With a friend from high school Brian Lai, plans were hatched, parts were ordered from eBay and AliExpress, and in his words “we built this monstrosity of a thing that looked like a little mini-fridge that was completely automated with a fan and lights and everything in it”.

“We thought this was awesome and we were going to go to market and try and sell this thing to cafés and take over the world, little did we know the market wasn’t ready for something like this”. 

Full of ambition to get the ball rolling, Xu and Lai approached investors and companies for help with their microgreen venture, and applied for the Sprout Agritech Accelerator program, to which they were selected.

Xu says that six months completely transformed the product into what it is today. The duo learnt the seed mats were their crowning glory and stripped everything else away.

“We found that if you put this thing on the windowsill it works just as well,” Xu says.

“Having learnt about hydroponics along the way we tried different nutrients that we put into our seed mats that allowed the microgreens to grow really well.

“We just wanted to create something that was cheap and easy to use, and showed people it was possible and really easy to grow their own greens at home.”

With their streamlined seed mats and growing trays they hit field days to find out if they’d have customers, and what those hypothetical customers would pay.

 “People were actually really interested in what we were doing, and we saw we could actually have a pretty good business out of this. We had a lot of people that pulled out their wallets and wanted to buy one of our prototypes.”

In February, the Micropod team, with a few new editions, went live selling starter kits that include a mix of seed mats – rocket, pak choi, mustard greens, red kale and mizuna – a biodegradable growing tray, and two growing grills.

The idea is customers grow their greens simply by watering them once and letting them sit for 7-12 days, harvest them, taste which ones they like, and reorder those seed mats. Xu says they already have customers signed up for automatic refills, cafes using them, and people taking them out on camping and fishing trips.

“I think there’s a an underlying value that people want to know where their food has come from, knowing they grew it themselves they have this pride, and it always tastes better. “It’s also something they want to show off to their friends”. 

A major selling point for microgreens is they pack a punch with nutrients, boasting up to forty times the nutrients of a fully-grown vegetable.

Xu says there’s a need to think of food as a circular economy, working out how much energy we put into growing versus how much we get from that food.

Where a head of lettuce can travel more than 2000 kilometers and use 36 times the fossil energy to be put on a plate than it has in food energy, microgreens can be grown anywhere and give you a huge dose of nutrients in one handful, he says.

Micropod plans to make inroads into the Australian market shortly and hopefully the US after that.  Once their name is more established Xu said the team plans to create something bigger so people can substitute most of their vegetable intake with microgreens.

But for the meantime,  he says he’s so grateful customers are loving what the team is doing after a whirlwind year getting everything off the ground, and all sights are set forward.

“The landscapes didn’t look that different from the Desert Road and the Central Plateau, and in places it was very similar to our farm in Taihape.”

As Dan and Jacqui finished a year of backpacking they kept the idea alive, and on returning to this side of the globe in 2013 it grew into a fully-fledged plan.

Jacqui, who hails from Melbourne, met Dan when she moved to the Waikato in 2010 to work with biological fertilizer, both having studied agriculture at uni. Jacqui, who has always been interested in health food, was already eating quinoa, “I was like what the hell is this sort of stuff, most New Zealanders didn’t know what quinoa was then,” Dan says.

But in 2013 as they made plans to start growing on Dan’s family farm in Taihape, all that changed. The United Nations declared it the international year of quinoa, the World Food and Agriculture Organization held an international symposium on the grain – even Oprah did a special feature.

“You can look back at that year and the price tripled, it took off.”

Suddenly everyone knew about the nutritionally rich and balanced grain from the Andes, and Dan and Jacqui were even more keen to get their trials into action. With around 90 per cent of quinoa exported from Peru and Bolivia, and those countries keeping their cards close to their chest, Dan says it was very difficult to get his hands on seeds.

In the end the couple sourced seeds from Europe and went through a year of trials before they found a grain that worked well, so well they set up a licensing agreement with the growers in France and England to grow 45 kilos of sowing seed.

After the first harvest in 2015 Dan and Jacqui gave some of their Kiwi Quinoa to a high-end supplier in Auckland and it ended up in Cape Kidnappers, Huka Lodge and Blanket Bay, making a name for itself as the country’s first homegrown crop.

Fast-forward four years and the Taihape product is on supermarket shelves across the country, with everyone showing interest from professional athletes seeking nutrient dense food to retirees wanting to diversify their diets.

“The public has been really, really responsive particularly little Taihape is so proud, so proud, no one knew what quinoa was and now Taihape is one of our greatest sellers,” Dan says.

As one of the most nutritionally balanced plant foods, that uses less water, less time and less inputs to grow than commodity crops like wheat or corn (the couple get between two to three tons of quinoa off a hectare) Dan says not just diners’ interests that have peaked, so too have farmers. Quinoa is a 100-day crop that can withstand drought and frost and Dan and Jacqui don’t use any herbicides or sprays on the hardy grain.

“We’re big on regenerative agriculture. I’m massive on animals and plants working together and it’s about diversity.

“I am first and foremost a livestock farmer, but certainly in New Zealand and around the world there’s trends towards plant based diets, pescatarian diets and veganism, if you look at the stats the increase is massive.”

He says as it stands, New Zealand is one of the most regenerative farming countries but we’re still far too heavy on animals. The future of farming is in diverse landscapes and cash crops alongside animal farming, Dan says.

“They are so symbiotic.

“We compare ourselves to European quinoa growers, they grow in a cropping system and we’re growing in a mixed livestock cropping system and we’re growing quinoa in the middle to upper range of their yields with 15 per cent of their fertilizer inputs.”

Since 2015 Dan and Jacqui have grown 100 tons of quinoa, and he says the goal is to start a network of growers across New Zealand and create an export industry.

“We’re well-positioned, New Zealand is fantastic exporter of food, we’re considered one of the best, so we can do that with quinoa as well. It’s a food the world wants and is only going to want more of, it’s still really early and it grows well here and can fit in with what were already doing.”

The next step, he says, is finding the people to help Kiwi Quinoa grow.

Brown says the idea for Arepa came from working for a large multinational energy drink company, but not being fond of selling caffeine and sugar to improve cognitive performance.

“I lost a couple of grandparents to brain-related illness, and from there I also saw friends and family struggle with anxiety and stress, so I thought, ‘Surely we can make something that’s good for you and good for your brain’,” Brown says.

Arepa is intended to be a focusing-yet-calming drink for people to consume to improve cognition functions before a stressful task, be it a social situation, public speaking event, or a sports competition.

It consists of a patented formula that uses New Zealand plant extracts of blackcurrants and pine bark, enzogenol (often used as a natural alternative for Ritalin), L-theanine (an amino acid and relaxing agent) and a rare amino acid extracted from green tea.

The idea for Arepa was formed in 2012, and Brown formally launched the product alongside co-founder Zac in 2017. Prior to its launch, Brown was working as business manager at government-funded Auckland operation FoodBowl, an innovation facility that helps the growth of food and beverage businesses.

While working there, fittingly, Brown was able to chip away at the R&D on his mental clarity drink.

Due to the nature of the wellness market and businesses that have previously made dubious health claims – which has led to a negative perception of these kind of products – Brown says Arepa wanted experts on board right from the start.

This is why it chose to invest almost $500,000 of its money on R&D. It is also investing in clinical studies to prove the effects of the drink.

Recently, a new study found consumption of Arepa improved cognitive performance and accuracy in physically fatigued athletes after 90 minutes of exercise. The company will publish these results early next year.

Brown says while Arepa is the product at the end of the supply chain in terms of ag-tech, there is huge interest in Silicon Valley and further abroad in food tech, which is where Sprout saw Arepa’s potential. He points to Impossible Foods, which has over received over US$100 million in investment and counts 130 of their 180 staff as food technologists.

“People always need to eat and drink, so food is getting smarter and the way you make it right from the farm gate is changing rapidly, with massive disruption,” Brown says. “We have that vertical integration that goes back all the way back to the soil and an end-to-end platform, so it’s what can we do along that value chain as a business.”

Overall, Arepa’s end goal is clear.

“Our vision is to empower people through mental clarity.”

The UN says it is time to rethink how we grow, share and consume our food.

With a population that is expected to reach 9.7 billion people globally by 2050 and two billion people out of that expected to be undernourished, this, along with increasing climate change, resource scarcity, and land degradation, means creative approaches to food are needed.

New Zealand has long been known for its primary industries, but new forms of food are emerging that are infused with our special brand of Kiwi innovation. Plant-based meats have sprouted, cellular agriculture and alternative protein products have spread across supermarkets and age-old ingredients are being revived into new products.

These include companies like Sunfed Meats, which has developed IP and infrastructure to locally manufacture meat-like products such as chicken-free chicken out of its premium yellow protein, and ?repa, a caffeine-free mental clarity drink that has ingredients derived from New Zealand plant extracts of blackcurrants and pine bark, are vital additions to the food landscape.

Investing in sustainable, innovative practices in agriculture and food production is the way forward to solving some of these problems the world is facing. The criteria for companies or businesses ideas we’re really interested in are those who are:

1. ? Using food waste in an inventive way

2.? Using indigenous ingredients or methods

3. ? Creating a more sustainable form of packaging.

The winner will win an $85,000 prize, which includes a place in Sprout’s future of food accelerator, cash and tickets to the Natural Food Expo in the US in March next year and coverage in Idealog.
 

How to enter

To enter, submit a brief description of your business idea to Shuttlerock and any photos, visuals, media or prototypes that support your concept, considering:

(a) Problem – What is the underlying problem that is being solved?
(b) Description – How does it reimagine how we grow, share or consume our food and/or food packaging? How would you explain it to a child? What stage of development are you at with this idea?
(c) Right to win – Why does it have a right to be successful?
(d) Impact – What impact could it have on the future of food production? How will this be measured?
e) Dream team – What is your dream team of partners that would make success easier? 

When completed, upload your business idea here to the campaign page (thanks, Shuttlerock!) where it will be displayed for all Idealog readers to see. Use the description box to explain your idea, and then upload an image or video support it. We strongly advise including visual media such as a photo, a sketch, or a prototype with your entry to illustrate your idea.

The image and video file sizes and types guide is linked where you submit your entry. 

Entries close 11:59pm 14 November, the deadline has been extended, so nows your chance to get your ideas forward. A panel of judges with representatives from Sprout Accelerator and Idealog will look at the desirability, viability and scalability of each product. 

A shortlist of finalists will be notified by email, and the winner will be announced at an event held at Sprout Accelerator in Palmerston North. 

The prize

Orange County, California

The winner will take home a prize worth $85,000. This includes:

a) A place in Sprout’s accelerator taking place in 2020
b) Mentorship to take your business idea to the next level
c) Cash, flights and tickets to the Natural Products Expo in Anheim, Orange County, California, USA in March 2020
d) A profile of your business in Idealog.

The rules

This competition is open to New Zealanders only. To travel to the US, the winner must have valid documentation (passport, visa and travel insurance) to enter. View the full terms and conditions here.

We look forward to seeing your brilliant ideas for the future of food production, but remember – there’s not much thyme, so make sure you get your entry in. ?