Hack för Maten – the teams and their pitches

Taking part of a hackathon is like entering another world for a short period of time. For a few days, almost anything is possible. This weekend, we were part of organising Hack för Maten, the food hackathon.

I’ve written before about hackathons so I will not go in to details now about what a hackathon is. Instead I want to highlight the projects that the participants built during the weekend.

There were five teams in total and about 25 participants. The first team was called Gut and built a prototype for a sensor that can detect what your food contains. Very cool stuff, almost magical. See their pitch below.

The second team tried to solve the problem for local farmers to sell to local buyers. The team was called Local Food Network. Surely a huge challenge worth tackling.

The third team wanted to make it easier to follow recipes. They called themselves Cooking for Computers and used lexical analysis to parse recipes and generate a visual guide instead of a text based recipe. Icons and images instead of text, “like Google Maps for recipes”.

The fourth team focused on waste and was called Food Loop. Basically, their goal was to prevent good food from being wasted by creating a platform for reuse.

Finally, the fifth team was called Open Jar and wanted to solve the problem of food that’s left in the fridge and then thrown away. You can see the full presentation of Open Jar here.

That’s it. A big thanks to all the participants for making magic during a weekend. Interested in running a hackathon inside your organisation or as part of an open innovation initiative? Contact us!