Our founders talk at Seeds & Chips in Milan
May 9, 2019
Seeds & Chips is one of the world’s leading food innovation summits, tackling challenges in the global food system. Over the last years, keynotes, such as Barack Obama, Howard Schultz, John F. Kerry and more, supported Seeds & Chips’ mission and provided a high-level platform for innovative start-ups to present their ideas.
At this year’s summit, SeeHow was in the midst of it. From 18 - 20 May, SeeHow exhibited at the conference. We had the chance to meet amazing entrepreneurs and representatives from the big players in the food industry. Moreover, we were invited to speak about the importance of transparency in the food value chain and how SeeHow’s solution can help brands communicate transparency to their consumers. We were honoured to take our topic to the centre stage of Seeds & Chips.
At the same time, we realised how important it is at such conferences not to lose the link to reality. Next doors to the Seeds & Chips exhibition premises, Tutto Food, one of Europe’s biggest food fairs, was taking place. We were granted access to this industry gathering, were “the real business” took place. More than 80.000 industry exhibitors and visitors met to make new business relationships and close deals. It gave us good insights into how hard innovation can be - how hard it can be for new ideas to trickle down from an innovation summit to an industry fair where price, quantity and connections rule. But also at Tutto Food, the topics of sustainability, traceability and digitalisation were omnipresent, pointing us the way to keep pushing.
In response to our speech at the conference, the renwoned industry newspaper Food Navigatior covered our story in an online article. The article substantially cites SeeHow’s co-founder Christoph, putting the word out for transparency as an opportunity for brands - and not a threat. However, Christoph not only talked about transparency as an opportunity, but also about where transparency needs to be presented to consumers. In fact, SeeHow’s approach is to leverage existing communication channels, such as brands’ social media accounts with millions of followers. Brands need to be transparent where consumers talk and interact with a brand. These places and moments range from so called micro moments, such as when consumers think about where to go shopping tonight or a photo on Instagram, to when they are actually in a brand’s physical or online store. And this is also where transparency needs to happen - not far away behind the sustainability tap of a website. Only then transparency becomes a real opportunity.
We were glad to have had the opportunity to present and exhibit at Seeds & Chips and look forward to next year’s conference.
