Haas News (June 11, 2016) highlighted our inaugural Food Innovation & Design Symposium, held at Jacobs Hall at UC Berkeley.

Quotes: Bacon infused in chocolate? Been there. Gingerbread Guinness ice cream and cricket salsa and cookies are where it’s at. Not to mention workplace vending machines that stock local coffee and kambucha. Those were among the latest food trends showcased at the inaugural Berkeley-Stanford Food Innovation & Design Symposium. . . . The sold-out gathering, held at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation at UC Berkeley on May 26, brought together entrepreneurs, scientists, investors and academics to share the latest on food entrepreneurship, science, design, and technology, as well as the global-local food movement. . . . “Berkeley is a pioneering, creative hub of food innovation, and food activism,” said symposium organizer Soh Kim, who serves as executive director of Food Design Research at Stanford University. “It was the perfect place to launch the FoodInno conference.” . . . In recent years, a host of food-related startups have come out of Berkeley and Haas—including Caviar, Krave Jerky, Revolution Foods, Back to the Roots, Boba Guys, Farmcation, and Byte.

The project was inspired by Dr. Soh Kim’s doctoral dissertation titled: Open Innovation Ecosystem: Chez Panisse Case Study (primary advisor: Alice Agogino), which was published as a Berkeley-Harvard case and in the California Management Review in 2014. Working with Prof. Martin Steinert at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), we won an award to seed research on “Open Innovation in Food Innovation and Design: Comparative Case Study of California Cuisine and New Nordic Cuisine”. This is an extension of Dr. Sohyeong Kim’s dissertation research on open innovation and the Northern California cuisine movement started by Alice Waters (she wrote us a letter of support for the proposal). The Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study is named after Norwegian-born Peder Sather, a former trustee of the College of California (which later became the University of California) and is the name on Sather Gate, which separates Sproul Plaza from a bridge over Strawberry Creek, as well as on Sather Tower, often known as the Campanile. See our July 1, 2015 blog for more on the Award for Open Innovation in Food Innovation and Design.

Image Caption: Arianne Agogino Gieringer, Alice Agogino, then doctoral student Soh Kim, Alice Waters and Edible School Yard team behind Chez Panisse. Showing Alice Waters data used in Sohyeong’s dissertation.

We also hosted a juice hackathon that a team of undergraduates from UC Berkeley (including two BESTies: Osvaldo Romero and Melanie Silva) won by creating a healthy breakfast drink alternative to coffee.

Juice Hack Winners: John Lim, Nina Krishnan, Osvaldo Romero, Ellen Chan, Melanie Silva.

 

 

 

 

 

Another BESTie team won the “popular choice award”. Their concept was a modular juice and mix-in platform, which we named “mod.” The product had a specialized container that let users twist the top to release a selected mix-in (such as citrus peel and vitamin C) into the base juice (such as lemonade). Its goal was to provide a personalized juice-drinking experience to health-conscious young adults. The team members in the final presentation were (left to right in photo below-left): Mallory Daly, Alan Zhang,Ellande Tang, Lee-Huang Chen, and Hannah Bourne. Other members of the team not shown are Abhishyant Khare and Kush Rastogi.

Many thanks to the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study, FoodInno/DrinkInno sponsors, the FoodInno student team (photo below, left-right: Puneet Sharma, Alex Wing, Clarissa Tan, Cindy Ma, Manisha Sharma, Vicky Jing, Allen Pittman, and Jon Cana). Thanks to our photo, sound and video crew: Po Bunyapamai, Lee Chen and Ed Zhu. Other volunteers  are: Jessie Sala, Hanna Ye, Hailey Zhou, Agnes Zhu, Sheila Visvanathan and Ellen Chan.

 

We have received a new grant from the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study on Implementing A Sustainable Aquaculture Strategy; Perceived Drivers And Challenges In Two Distinct Innovation Systems: Norway And California. What Can We Learn From Each Other?