What an incredible first Annual Meeting!! The Next Food Collective partners enjoyed an absolutely fantastic and inspiring day at Unilever Foods Innovation Centre 'Hive', Wageningen on November 3rd, 2023. The start of some great cooperations in 2024 and thereafter. Together, we took the first steps in moving from vision to joint action.
The afternoon was packed with networking opportunities, inspiring conversations about strategy, directions and new ideas. All focussed on how we as a collective can (re)shape our collaborations to accelerate the transitions to sustainable food systems and healthy diets.
ReGeNL
During the meeting we took the opportunity to congratulate the ReGeNL core team, and all 54 partners, with obtaining the investment from the National Growth Fund for the ReGeNL programme and thanked them for all their hard work in the past year(s).
Inspiration & Collaboration
The break-out session on Sustainable Agriculture during the meeting was of course used to further define the next steps in the ReGeNL programme, which will kick off in 2024. The other breakout sessions on the Themes Sustainable Processing, Healthy Diets & Wellbeing and Sustainable Proteins, all had a very different set-up. Where the processing group started their meeting with an outline of a roadmap for this theme created in previous sessions, the protein and the healthy diet groups focussed on generating ideas for collaboration as well as defining barriers and challenges for the transitions. All 4 sessions were extremely constructive, reflecting the enthusiasm within Next Food Collective to work together in creating roadmaps and collaborations to speed up the essential transitions and create impact.
Networking
After the networking drinks everybody left fully energised and ready to tackle the challenges in building a sustainable agrifood industry.
And if we had to select one take-home message for this day it would be from Manfred Aben “if you think you can do it alone, you are not thinking big enough”.
Thank you and see you next year!
A big thank you to all participants and to everybody that helped us in making this meeting to a success including of course all the people at 'Hive' Unilever.
We are looking forward to continue working together and we hope you all enjoy your bottle of Next Bock on a cold winter evening!
