How two British companies are battling it out for a share of UAE’s $1m FoodTech prize

As the coronavirus pandemic has flagged up the world’s reliance on globalisation and international travel, in addition, it highlighted something a lot more crucial - the value of food security.

A worldwide race is underway to answer that question and the UAE has thrown down a challenge to all-comers to come up with answers. Two British companies are actually in the running to win a share of a $1 million prize from the UAE FoodTech Challenge, a competition that aims to find agritech answers to the food security issues that plague the globe.

Lincolnshire-based Jones Food Company (JFC), which operates Europe’s major vertical farm, while London’s SafetyNet Technologies, which includes developed an LED-equipped netting system to greatly help fishermen avoid snaring certain species with their catch, are among 12 finalists competing for the prize on November 17 and 18. A lot more than 435 entrants from 68 countries entered the contest.

Pioneers of the technological revolution in farming think that bringing agriculture indoors allows several advances including control of the environment. In countries where in fact the climate may well not be conducive to growing this means a supply of fresh produce all year, whatever the outdoor conditions.

Since the facility is totally self-contained, you don't have for pesticide or herbicide, with produce grown using hydroponic technology, without soil and with 95 % less water used than in traditional farming - perfect for the UAE.

“What we saw in the UAE is a combo of factors which made domestic farming for several produce quite tricky - the climate, having less stable arable land, and the sort of high urban levels, with the populations concentrated in cities,” said Will Parry of Jones Food Company on your choice to enter the FoodTech Challenge.

“We see vertical farming as a prime solution to these issues where one can supply super-fresh produce within a few days to an evergrowing urban population. So we saw the UAE as an ideal partner for all of us, but we didn't have any boots on the floor there and this competition is a superb way to learn about the marketplace and … build relationships so that you can help us launch in to the country.”

Increasing the UAE’s self-sufficiency, indigenous food production functions and reducing food waste are fundamental priorities for the country’s government, which unveiled its food security strategy in 2018. It aims to create 60 % more food by 2051 and halve how much food wasted every year by 2030.

Like many desert nations, the UAE has limited usage of fresh water and only 1 1 per cent of its land is arable, meaning the united states faces significant hurdles in making food to sustain its rapidly expanding population.

With the UAE importing between 80 to 90 per cent of its food, based on the FoodTech Challenge, and the country’s average temperate likely to increase by 2.5 Celsius by 2050, food production faces a number of difficulties.

"When we launched the task over this past year, we could do not have anticipated the situation we find ourselves in today," said Mariam Almheiri, minister of state for water and food security, which is hosting the competition with Abu Dhabi company Tamkeen.

The Covid-19 pandemic and its own effect on global food chains has reiterated the need for us to lessen our reliance on food imports and to find new means of producing food.

Mariam Almheiri

"The Covid-19 pandemic and its own impact on global food chains has reiterated the necessity for us to lessen our reliance on food imports and find new ways of creating food, with technology-enabled home farming being a definite area of promise."

SafetyNet Technologies, another UK finalist, said the UAE’s mission aligns using its own bid to create technology which will help an evergrowing global population that’s reliant on fish as a primary way to obtain protein.

“The UAE is a really large market plus they eat double the common of the global consumption of fish, so it is a significant high fish-consuming country,” said Nadia Laabs, co-founder and chief operating officer at the business.

“Their fisheries sector has been growing year on year. I think that is one area where we would like to be able to help them harvest the ocean sustainably and responsibly feed the growing population.”

Not yet active in the UAE, JFC is a UK-grown business that started businesses in 2016 when founder James Lloyd-Jones saw a television programme about vertical farming.

After carrying out some research, Mr Lloyd-Jones figured to ensure that the venture to work, he previously to build the largest farm he could, which he did in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire.

Today, the farm is the greatest in Europe with 4,000 square metres of growing space, the same as 26 tennis courts, which is with the capacity of growing between 50 to 100 tonnes of herbs and leafy greens a year.

“What you have can be an extremely land-efficient, resource-efficient, indoor environment that may control the growing conditions with absolute precision so as to create the very best product possible,” said Mr Parry.

He said JFC’s concept would help the UAE reduce its reliance on international imports for the reason that farm can grow at scale and at volume, which would drastically reduce food miles.

Like British consumers, UAE shoppers increasingly prefer to buy food that has not travelled quite a distance and with the pandemic disrupting supply chains “in ways we’ve never seen before”, the necessity for vertical farming hasn't be more realised, said Mr Parry.

While the UAE already has a couple of vertical farms in operation, Mr Parry says JFC comes with an advantage as it can build large farms that measure to 10,000 square metres.

“Scale is a key part in conditions of fulfilling large retail contracts and serving significant chunks of the populace,” he said.

The business, which plans to open another UK facility next year within an undisclosed location, also has the muscle of British online supermarket Ocado, which last year became the lead investor in JFC, taking the full total the company has raised up to now to around £10 million.

“They really are the first choice on grocery automation, logistics, engineering and construction and we have that muscle behind us," said Mr Parry. "There are really no other vertical farm builders that bring all that to the table.”

If JFC won the contest, Mr Parry said the company would utilize the money to help start up its UAE arm, with Abu Dhabi an excellent fit primarily and the focus set to be on leafy greens such as for example kale, pak choi and lettuce along with herbs.

For SafetyNet Technologies, a company started in 2011 by Dan Watson, the journey to the UAE has taken just a little longer.

Mr Watson was studying design engineering at Glasgow University when he was asked to design a remedy for a recurrent global issue. After reading about Norwegian fishermen being fined for discarding fish they didn’t want from their catch, he found scientific papers from the 1970s where scientists noticed interesting behavioural responses from fish to light.

He contacted scientists which were looking at light as a bycatch mitigation - a method used to lessen the catch of non-target species - and started developing tools for that.

“The original prototype was a hardware that would match the nets and was literally a ring that lit up,” said Ms Laabs.

Today that device has evolved into Pisces, a product designed with UK fisheries that uses different frequency, intensity and polarisation of light to attract or repel species of fish, depending on what fishermen want to catch.

“At this time about one in 10 fish that are caught are actually the incorrect fish,” said Ms Laabs. “They could either be juvenile, an endangered species or simply non-market species that can’t be sold easily.”

With stricter fishing regulations in the EU, the US and elsewhere, Ms Laabs said fishermen must now land all of the fish they catch instead of throw them overboard.

“So this leads to over 9 million tonnes of fish being discarded each year that are caught wrongly," she said.

Utilizing a precision fishing product that only catches the required species reduces waste, as applying light technology can reduce the bycatch by up to 90 %.