🔎Identifying

Food Tech 3.0's process to identify local food technology can be summarised as follows: 1) going slow and integrating into the local food network; 2) identifying and co-defining food tech with the local community; 3) calling for local food tech innovations. (Make sure to read the Context: FoodSHIFT2030 section so you can understand what things like "Accelerator Labs," "Advisory Boards," and "FoodSHIFT2030" is).

Food Tech 3.0 Advisory Board members in Bioma.

1) Going Slow & Integrating into the Local Network

Given Fab Lab Barcelona’s newness in the field of food, we had to work diligently to enmesh ourselves into the network of local food actors. During this first step, we started slowly and sought to build trust in the existing community of practice.

We spent the first part of 2020 connecting with several stakeholders Fab Lab Barcelona had already worked with that were more involved in topics related to food. We approached them through one-on-one meetings to explain FoodSHIFT2030, and later, Food Tech 3.0. Once we received support from several actors, we were more easily able to approach new organizations and collectively ask them to take part in Food Tech 3.0’s Advisory Board.

The Advisory Board consists of Loïc Le Goueff from Green in Blue; Co-Responsable’s Edith Claros; Doris Boira from La Fabric@ and La Taca d’Oli; AbonoKM0’s founders Miki Royan and Diego Waehner; Adela Martínez González, founder of Huertos in the Sky; Arleny Medina Prince from Restaurante LEKA; Rasmus Bjerngaard, founder of Nextfood. Their role was invaluable in situating Food Tech 3.0 in the context of Barcelona and pushing innovators to question their approaches and situate themselves in the local context.

The Advisory Board members came from different areas of Barcelona's vibrant food ecosystem.

During the first and second meetings, there was ample confusion around what FoodSHIFT was, what Food Tech 3.0 was, and how we planned to advance. Given the long timelines of EU projects, the broadness of project-defined goals and the complexity of local and global actions, it was challenging to demonstrate tangible examples of where we were going, what collaboration might look like and the benefits that could be shared through being involved. Part of this is symptomatic of working on EU projects, whose own plan evolves simultaneously with pilot deployment.

While we still couldn’t yet give hard examples of where we were going, we used this time to listen to stakeholders. In one-to-one meetings, we heard from advisory board members about the current issues they were facing and the issues they felt existed in their field. Following the 1-to-1 meeting and the first full advisory board meeting, we used the information that the members had offered to create a hypothetical version of Food Tech 3.0, connecting their hopes for the future with the goals of Food Tech 3.0 and FoodSHIFT.

2) Identifying & co-defining Food Tech

In the next phase, we worked to: increase familiarity with food technology and a space to interact with it as well as foster co-ownership of a new definition of food technology at both internal and external events.

During a subsequent advisory board meeting, we then were able to illustrate a more complete picture. We hosted our meeting in the AbonoKM0 host site (Bioma), brought in an actual tech artifact (the Smart Citizen Kit) and hosted a mini-activity that familiarized the members with the importance and use of data and open monitoring and data platforms while also serving as an actual example of how Food Tech 3.0 might conduct a workshop to introduce community members to a piece of food technology. We also commented on the stakeholders’ own current and potential interactions with food technology. We found that this made our aims much clearer to our advisory board members, especially those unfamiliar with “tech” and related concepts.

One group of advisory board members predicting where in Bioma the Smart Citizen Kits were placed based on the humidity and solar data the sensors reported.

After the activity, we held a brainstorming session to co-define Food Tech 3.0’s food technology, taking into account the goals for Food Tech 3.0 pre-defined by the FoodSHIFT project scope and those of the Advisory Board members, acting as representatives for the local food ecosystem.

This information was then digested by our internal team to create Food Tech 3.0’s five pillars, described earlier in Our Food Tech Vision: Food Tech 3.0, in addition to Food Tech 3.0’s common priorities.

Food Tech 3.0’s five common priorities were created based on co-definition and co-creation sessions with the Food Tech 3.0 Advisory Board. The common priorities are considered the actionable items broken down from the more abstract goals presented in Food Tech 3.0’s pre-defined Innovation Focuses and Lab Impacts.
1) Use an online platform (i.e. Discord) to create a space for the food tech community to share knowledge, search for collaborations, provide one another with feedback, and build community within the local ecosystem
2) Accelerate initiatives with maker education & Fab Lab's Future Learning Approach
3) Socialize using food tech to facilitate/solve community problems by normalizing and building capacity in tech users and communities
4) Food tech 3.0 can serve as a collective voice to represent bottom-up legislative change regarding the production, elaboration of, and recycling/upcycling of local food
5) Use data sharing platforms to help inspire collective intelligence decision making that can improve how an innovator monitors and manages their work

By the time we had our first-- unfortunately COVID-interrupted-- in-person event in the Fall of 2020, the steering committee participants seemed to feel comfortable in a group with one another and comfortable with talking about their work related to technology. This became even clearer once we held the Food Tech 3.0 online launch in December. When listening to each of the steering committee members, they were able to clearly express how they relate to Food Tech 3.0 and why they were doing so.

3) Calling for food tech innovations

Now that we had defined what food technology looked like in Food Tech 3.0 and for Fab Lab Barcelona, we worked to raise awareness about the food vision of Food Tech 3.0 and Fab Lab Barcelona and invited initiatives to begin to interact with Food Tech 3.0.

In December 2020, we hosted an online kickoff for Food Tech 3.0 that served as the launch of an open call for food technology initiatives to apply to the incubation program that would later be carried out as part of Food Tech 3.0. 27 innovators applied to take part in the incubation program and 10 were eventually selected by an internal panel of experts.

In case your curious of learning about the very beginning of Food Tech 3.0, you can check the full welcome video here! All of the advisory board members also introduce themselves and share their perspectives.

There were multiple reasons for hosting an open call: the open call helped to foster the new narrative as Fab Lab Barcelona, and Fab Labs in general, as a space in which food tech can be created and housed; open our doors and further welcome Barcelona’s citizens, professionals and makers into our space; attract a diversity of ideas and approaches; ingratiate ourselves into the narrative of the World Capital of Sustainable Food, which was hosted in Barcelona in 2021.

The open call and supporting information can be found here.