TEL AVIV, Aug. 9 (Xinhua) -- Israel's largest food maker Tnuva has hosted the first food tech innovation competition in the country, which attracted dozens of Israeli food tech startups.
The startups in the race, held on Wednesday in Tel Aviv, were vying for the top 10 seats in the final to present their technologies.
The competition was created by Tnuva for Israeli startups to showcase their innovation in the food tech field.
"We decided at the end of 2017 to set up an innovation program at Tnuva after we have not dealt with it for years," Tnuva CEO Eyal Melis said at the event.
With 15 factories in Israel, Tnuva hosts the competition out of its need to cultivate innovation within the company to adapt to the dynamics of the food industry, with a special interest in e-commerce, food tech and agro-tech.
"We have to open up to the innovation that comes from outside the organization, there are millions of scientists in the world and we are trying to open ourselves," said Melis.
Most of the participating companies are developing proprietary technologies.
Jet-Eat is developing a technology of 3D print food, while Crazy S.O.B's app uses natural language processing to extract recipes from various online media sources and parse them out into smart shopping lists, matching the lists with ingredients from nearby stores.
Some technologies sprung from research conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Jerusalem-based lab-produced meat startup Future Meat Technologies is developing a manufacturing platform for the production of meat products directly from animal cells.
With a 2.2-million-U.S. dollar seed investment by the venture capital arm of U.S. food corporation Tyson Foods Inc., the company is set to launch its first line of meat products by 2020.
Two of the biggest winners at the competition are Innovopro and Hargol Podtech.
Innovo Pro has developed a unique technology for the production of protein and starch from chickpeas, while Hargol Podtech specializes in the cultivation of grasshoppers to use them as an alternative protein source.
"Tnuva will bring them to the father who are currently building, each company will receive guidance and assistance and an attempt to reach an industrial scooter of 300,000 shekels (81,550 dollars)," said Melis.
In 2015, China's Bright Food bought control of Tnuva, Israel's biggest food maker, in a deal worth 8.6 billion shekels.
