Participants in the ProVeg Food Innovation Challenge can win cash awards totalling $10,000

College and university students across the Asia Pacific region are being encouraged to take part in a unique and exciting competition to further develop plant-based food products.

Launched today, the ProVeg Food Innovation Challenge APAC 2022 is run by global food awareness organisation ProVeg International to encourage students to accelerate plant-based food innovation. Cash prizes totalling up to US$10,000 will be awarded to the best ideas.

“Asia presents the largest opportunity for plant-based diets with such a wide variety of exciting ingredients,” Shirley Lu, Managing Director ProVeg Asia, said. 

“To tap into this enormous opportunity to truly transform our food systems, innovation is key. Asia needs more tasty, healthy, and convenient plant-based products targeting not only vegans but all types of consumers and we look forward to hearing what this talented generation Z has to offer,” she added.

The Food Innovation Challenge will allow students to gain valuable insight into an exciting and fast-growing industry while channelling their creativity and skills toward solving some of the biggest challenges facing the world today. Accelerating the transition to plant-based diets is vital to help break climate change because plant-based foods emit half as much CO2 as animal-based foods.

ProVeg is inviting university students from all academic disciplines enrolled in undergraduate or graduate programmes in the Asia Pacific region to take part in the challenge. The challenges set for the students are as follows:

• Develop a unique selling proposition for Oatly’s yoghurt, identify target consumers, and develop product concepts and a launch plan in Asia or your selected market.
• Develop a recipe utilising Beyond Meat’s minced pork that can be presented to a foodservice chain based in Asia. Specify which foodservice operator you are pitching to and formulate a marketing strategy to support sales of your recipe. 
• Develop a local dish for CPF all over the Asia-Pacific region using a plant-based meat alternative, such as plant-based beef, pork, chicken or seafood, to achieve both the taste and texture of real meat.
• Choose one of The Vegetarian Butcher’s product prototypes from the plant-based beef patty, plant-based mince beef and plant-based chicken balls and propose a new product application for target consumers. The application should include product format and series of varieties, product names, product claims, advertising slogans, and the package design.
• Use Haofood plant-based chicken to develop a series of applications, identify target food-service customers, and develop a launch plan.
• Further develop OMNI’s new plant-based range, OmniSeafood, including OMNI Tuna, OMNI Classic Fillet, Omni Golden Fillet, and Omni Ocean Burger. Identify the key selling point and which seafood dishes can better attract a new generation by making it easy to buy and share on social media.  

ProVeg launched the very first Food Innovation Challenge in China in 2020 and expanded the 2021 Challenge to include South-East Asia. The 2021 Challenge won the ‘Best use of digital by a charity, NGO or NFP’ Award at the Digital Impact Awards. The 2022 edition of the competition has been expanded to the entire Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.

Fred Zhu, R&D Head of Asia at Oatly, said of last year’s Challenge: “As one of our target groups is Generation Z, the participants of this campaign – university students – can inspire us a lot and raise valuable ideas.”To register for the competition, please go to https://food-innovation-challenge.proveg.com/