Business Sustainability Challenge Winners Announced
Growing Kent & Medway
A world-class research, innovation & enterprise cluster for horticultural food and drink production.
The second round of funding for our Growing Kent & Medway Business Sustainability Challenge has awarded a share of £200,000 to six innovative local businesses.
The funding will support sustainability in the food and drink sectors through high-impact projects. The businesses are led by a fascinating group of entrepreneurs, including a part-time PhD student, a kitchen-based producer of South Indian takeaway cuisine, and a group of microbiologists and plant scientists.
A diverse range of projects have been funded, including developing fermented snacks from rescued fruits and vegetables, producing sustainable packaging from brewers' spent grain, and optimising water and fertiliser use in indoor farming through data management platforms. Details of all the winning projects can be found here.
Pioneering the second harvest
We recently caught up with one of the winners from our first round of Business Sustainability Challenge funding. Tensei were awarded £50,000 to develop their pioneering second harvest trials which uses agricultural residues as a new raw material feedstock.
Filmed at Fruit Focus 2024, this interview explores how Tensei is transforming crop leftovers into innovative materials, reducing plastic use, and creating new revenue streams for farmers while lowering carbon footprints.
On Friday 20th September, together with Locate in Kent, we welcomed a delegation of businesses and academics from a Dutch UK Agri-Tech Mission organised by the British Embassy in The Hague and the UK Government’s Department for Business and Trade to Kent.
Industry leaders, academics and entrepreneurs from across the UK and the Netherlands met to discuss opportunities for future trade collaboration and innovation. This was the final stop of the three-day Agri Tech Mission and delegates visited NIAB and Discovery Park.
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