Over the 6-week TFF Challenge period, you can dive into curated, on-demand digital content, weekly entrepreneurship, and topic-related live sessions that feature industry leaders and successful agrifood tech startups, and can access 24/7 support.
By signing up, you also gain access to the TFF Digital Labs, our learning and collaboration platform that hosts resources that support you at every stage of your journey—from ideation through to incorporated startup.
The TFF Digital Labs has recently undergone a significant upgrade and now offers increased functionality and more content. You’ll read more on the following pages.
Unlike other prize challenges and startup competitions, TFF focuses on collaboration and sharing in everything we do. From the very first step of signing up for the TFF Challenge, participants must find teammates to work with – and, more often than not, these teams are multidisciplinary and even across countries, cultures, and language lines.
As these teams progress through the Challenge process, we incentivize them to share their ideas and perspectives openly with each other and to connect with other teams around the world to answer each other’s questions.
The Challenge offers open data and open-source toolkits and encourage participants to share enabling technologies, best practices, and know-how to accelerate the speed and impact of beneficial innovation.
True to the change’s ethos, they make our educational curriculum available for anyone to use and also encourage you to explore and experiment with alternative business models that are based on open innovation and open data to arrive at solutions faster.
The challenge also strives to foster locally-relevant solutions that are readily implementable in the markets they are targeting. The world’s food systems are incredibly complex and need to be looked at considering local agricultural practices, traditions, and challenges.
Considering agriculture’s many local factors, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
The TFF Challenge is a place for anyone who wants to build feasible solutions that steer the future towards sustainable, nourishing, and resilient food systems. We are calling on scientists, designers, engineers, marketers, farmers, developers, and anyone else passionate about the future of our food. No background in food and agriculture is needed.
The TFF Challenge will without any doubt transform your life and propel your career as a social business leader. By submitting your pitch you will have the chance to win:
All pitch submissions are eligible for the TFF Challenge prizes. All teams will go through the same TFF Challenge program regardless of whether they want to apply for a specific prize or not.
The TFF Challenge is looking for locally-relevant solutions that can be scaled globally and which address a wide range of pressing challenges across all parts of the food value chain—from production to distribution through to consumption and waste.
Teams are called on to leverage science and technology breakthroughs in areas like artificial intelligence, robotics, fintech, and biotechnology, and to utilize inclusive business models such as circularity, open data, and sharing economy. In addition to the topical prizes, the following solution areas are of particular interest:
Key dates at a glance.
Since the first TFF Challenge in 2013, the challenge has supported more than 30,000 innovators from over 175 countries and helped to launch 70+ startups that have gone on to raise millions of dollars, gain partnerships with leading companies, gain global exposure, and make on-the-ground impact in every region.
Some of these startups include Agrilution (DE), Climate Edge (UK), Safi Organics (Kenya), Banoo (ID), Agrosmart (BR), The Live Green Co. and AgroSpheres (USA).