Moonshoots in the food system space

The Center for Food Challenges supports bold, high-risk, high-reward research initiatives that aim at tackling key societal challenges in the food system. We aim to overcome them by designing, building, and executing transformative research programs that can radically improve food systems for all.

We pursue three core missions:

Nutrition for Health

Preventing and treating Non-Communicable Diseases through nutrition.

Soil Sustainability

Addressing soil impoverishment and erosion in agriculture to sustain healthy ecosystems.

Future Food Factory

Develop advanced processes and systems to produce nutritious and sustainable food.

These challenges span biology, sensor engineering, artificial intelligence, medicine, clinical practice, behavioral and social sciences, agriculture, process engineering, and public health.

Addressing them requires close coordination across disciplines and stakeholders, while simultaneously advancing new technologies and scientific insights and translating them into tangible improvements in people’s lives.

Venture-backed startups and incumbent companies often lack sufficient economic incentives to address these challenges because many necessary solutions are not profitable enough to justify the required investment.

A mission-oriented approach

A different level of coordination is required to deliver on all those fronts. A dedicated, mission-oriented initiative is needed to provide strategic guidance and efficient resource allocation, while coordinating the research activities of laboratories from very different domains.

For each challenge that the Center addresses, we:

Identify the key systemic bottlenecks (i. e., why nobody had solved it before).
Assess EPFL’s critical mass & needed competencies to tackle them.
Design strategies to address the challenges and ensure a tangible, measurable impact.