Students and seasoned experts, app designers, nutritionists, blockchain geeks, machine learning specialists and many more worked through 32 hours at the Open Food Data Hackdays last weekend so that we can eat smarter tomorrow. So that empty plates will be fuller in future and overfull stomachs slimmer. So that daily waste comes to an end — and so that, in the end, all this might even be good business that makes sense. In total, 10 new food solutions were presented.

Hackathons have now become a standard tool in the innovation toolbox of even the largest companies: word has spread, since Opendata.ch really got started with them in Switzerland 6 years ago, that the combination of collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, genuine intrinsic motivation and a hard deadline can produce great results. What was new at this year’s Food Hackdays was the even deeper collaboration with business: 9 “challenges” based on open datasets were set for the participants by emerging or existing start-ups — first-rate data puzzles.

Simon Michel, co-founder of the start-up Prognolite, says: “We made data from our partner Jucker Farm available for the Hackdays because we were looking for ideas about everything that can be forecast and optimised using restaurant sales figures. In addition to a brilliant, working prototype, we collected many new ideas and met great people.”

Charlotte Soland, nutritionist, adds: “As a food expert, I took part in the Open Food Data Hackdays to learn more about programming and open data. I am surprised and impressed by how much you can achieve and learn in such a short time!”

Technologically, it was striking that machine learning and blockchain applications have reached the stage at which you can “just quickly try something out” at a hackday. Several hackday teams worked successfully on corresponding challenges. Vlad Trifa, Chief Product Officer of Ambrosus, took the opportunity: “The Open Food Data Hackdays were the ideal event to make the Ambrosus software platform publicly accessible for the first time and to open ourselves up even further to the community. I am really impressed by the speed at which working prototypes came together here: one team showed a nice approach for the reliable recall of food, another convincingly tackled the increasingly serious global problem of ‘fake food’. In a normal business context, all this would have taken weeks and months!“

A hackathon start-up accelerator

At hackathons, after working through, the air has usually gone out and everyone goes their own way. For two of the projects, selected by an expert jury, things are only now really getting started. They will be supported by Opendata.ch with coaching and networking and can jump straight into the final round of the prestigious start-up incubator MassChallenge Switzerland:

• Prognolite uses data and forecasting tools to solve restaurants’ biggest problem: unknown future guest numbers and consumption. This makes it possible to reduce ‘food waste’ and plan staff more efficiently.
• BeerChain uses data and the Ambrosus blockchain to fight counterfeit products, demonstrated at the hackday with major beer brands. Using an individual QR code, users can test whether a product is genuine and in its original condition — or manipulated or copied “fake food”. The start-up Ambrosus, very well funded thanks to crypto financing, is itself investing in the approach.

The next Open Food Data Hackdays

The next Hackdays will take place as early as 16 and 17 February at the Alte Markthalle in Basel. New challenges, datasets and highly motivated teams await everyone who wants to use high-speed prototyping to develop new solutions for smarter eating and a better food system. 

About Opendata.ch

Opendata.ch is part of Open Knowledge and thus of a global movement that advances transparency and innovation, efficiency and participation by opening up data. Open data gives new actors new opportunities and is also increasingly being used by companies as a catalyst for open innovation processes. Opendata.ch is led by its President André Golliez, together with a Board drawn from media, technology and science. The Open Food Data Hackdays were organised by Nikki Böhler, Hannes Gassert and Oleg Lavrovsky.

 

More up-to-date information at http://food.opendata.ch and on Twitter at @OpendataCH, hashtag #openfood.

You can find pictures of the Hackdays here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1zCWZNcQYR6f0AYG5ecqXVaEEtbyEIGeQ

You can find the video summary of the Hackdays here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1bYdn8QvlGU3MTBthfCRd6oxBvhQTGnzz