Fab City Summit

Frederik LEAN HANSEN, Growstack, CPH Foodtech Community
Rasmus Bjerngaard, Nextfood, CPH Foodtech Community

The future of food is actually in your hands.

It's beyond discussion that we need alternative solutions for how our food system works. What most people don't realise is that making a difference in this field is not reserved for a select few. With todays community-driven collaborative methods and open technology, anyone can make hands-on impact on the future of food.

Growstack is an open-source community project that removes barriers for urban food production, starting with vertical farming. 
It’s all about ensuring high food quality, resource efficiency and our future food security while democratising the access to smarter and more controlled ways of producing food.

We are collecting and opening up access to a modular technology stack while sharing the needed hands-on knowledge, which in turn works as a platform for kickstarting local food production in cities. Additionally, we are kickstarting new urban vertical farming operations, starting from Copenhagen, in order to make a flexible blueprint for how to organise local foodtech cooperatives and make decentralised urban food production happen in an economically viable way.

This is all made possible by gathering a proactive open-source community with diverse skillsets and backgrounds around co-building our future food system.

Join the session to find out how YOU can get started in your own city right now.


Beno JUAREZ, FAB LAB PERU / FAB LAT
TreeD - Digital Tree | From standarized to customized nutrition

TreeD | DIGITAL TREE | Revolutionary proposal focused on eradicating malnutrition in developing countries, especially for children from 0-7 years old, promoting sustainable agro and environment protection through a platform for customized nutrition and 3D printing for nutrients.

1. THE CHALLENGE | “We need a profound reform of the world agrarian and food system if we want to nourish the 815 million hungry people that currently exist on the planet and the two billion additional people who will live in the year 2050. "(SDG 2. UN, 2015). The presence of malnutrition becomes the enemy in the fight against extreme poverty and social exclusion, inheriting the marginality in families with little access to quality food. It is well known that a child who has grown up in malnutrition has few opportunities to develop physically and intellectually, affecting their own growth as a citizen in a globalized and competitive society. Main causes are:
A. STANDARDIZED NUTRITION | Traditional child nutrition programs use standardized products without taking into account the specific requirements of each child. It causes a poor absorption of vitamins in the body.
B. LOGISTIC COSTS | The waste rate in agro products are more than 60% because of the logistic process. Farmers have little capacity to negotiate with intermediaries, because their products are perishable and must be sold in a short time, which increases poverty in the production areas and increases the costs of the products in the market.
C. IMPACT ON THE ENVIRONMENT | the high demand for certain products generates over-exploitation of agricultural land and constant pressure on natural areas, such as the case of the Amazon, where more than 20% of the forests have been depredated for livestock and agricultural purposes.

2. THE OPPORTUNITY | From standarized to customized nutrition | Hypothesis: Artificial Intelligence, Digital Manufacturing, and Global networks can help to address the global challenge of "End hunger, achieve food security and improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture" SDG 2. UN, 2015.  How? Through the Personalized Made at Home Manufacture of vitamin supplements, we can impact both the improvement of the nutritional quality of people (especially mothers and children between 0-7 years old), decrease cost of logistics and distributions, the improvement of the farmers production and the access to global market for farmers and the development of a sustained agriculture that benefits the ecosystems at high biodiversity areas.

Sebastien GOELZER , Vergers Urbains , Founder
Presentation of the Tootem vertical farming system.