Food Boost Challenge
Food Boost
Challenge
How do you entice young people to make healthier and more plant-based choices? During the Food Boost Challenge, young people come up with creative solutions themselves and work together with businesses and experts to turn them into real, tested concepts. In doing so, we build towards a healthier next generation and a sustainable future.
Why the Food Boost Challenge?
Young people are tempted daily to make unhealthy food choices: at school, on the go, in sports canteens, and on social media. Only a small percentage reaches the recommended daily intake of fruit and vegetables, while overweight and lifestyle-related diseases among youth are on the rise. This affects their health both now and in the future, and impacts the planet.
The Food Boost Challenge – an initiative of HortiHeroes, Foodvalley NL and The Hague University of Applied Sciences – aims to change this. Not by telling young people what they should eat, but by letting them come up with the solutions themselves, together with companies, social organizations, and educational institutions. Because who better to figure out what helps young people than young people themselves?
How does the Food Boost Challenge work?
The Food Boost Challenge is an innovation program in which young people work through five phases, from research to a concrete, tested prototype:
- Research | Young people investigate the food environment of their own target group, as well as the barriers and opportunities for making healthier choices.
- Idea generation | Teams submit creative concepts to make healthy and plant-based eating more appealing.
- Co-creation | The most promising ideas are selected and further developed together with experts and partners.
- Finale | Teams present their prototypes to a professional jury and the public, with the best ideas being awarded.
- Implementation | Promising concepts are developed further with partners into pilots or market-ready products.
What are the results of the Food Boost Challenge?
The Food Boost Challenge offers more than just ideas:
- For young people: hands-on experience in innovation, collaboration with professionals, expansion of their network, and the chance to truly realize their idea.
- For partners: direct insight into the world of young people, fresh perspectives, and concrete, impactful solutions.
- For society: new concepts and products that contribute to a healthier generation and a more sustainable food environment.
The Food Boost Challenge in 2 minutes
A movement towards healthy and plant-based choices
Whether it’s a new product, a creative way of presenting, a tech solution, or an adjustment in the food environment, the Food Boost Challenge encourages concepts that make it easier, more fun, and more attractive for young people to choose vegetables, fruit, legumes, nuts, and wholegrain products, and eat fewer animal-based products.
Together, we are building a future in which healthy food is the norm, and in which young people themselves write the recipe for a healthy next generation.
Curious about the previous edition of the Food Boost Challenge? Read more here!