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