Booming interest in food tech: 'Collaborate to change the future of food'

A self-styled ‘festival’ of food technology, London Food Tech Week was staged across five days and five London venues. Each day tackled a different theme, including home, hospitality, retail and production technologies.

The event was launched in 2013, in response to what founder Nadia El Hadery saw as a real need to join the dots between innovation in food, financial backing and scale-up. “We felt we could build a community that would bring start-ups, investors and brands together to collaborate to change the future of food.”​

London Food Tech Week and the community built around it aimed to address three “key challenges”​, El Hadery told FoodNavigator.

“No one in food was setting up food tech companies – everyone was an ex-banker… There was a huge disconnect between the information that founders were using to build their businesses and industry knowledge,”​ she suggested.

Hadery continued: “There was no money on the table, everybody was looking for the next big fin-tech investment. [And] if you had managed to find a good idea and raise some money for it there was nobody to scale the business.”​

Check out our video for further insight into the explosion of food tech over the past five years.

Additional b-roll footage from Videezy.com​