Harmony is proud to feature Shirley Sze-To, our Business Strategy and Operations Lead, on the Brinc speaking panel at the 5^th Annual Asia-Pacific Agri-Food Innovation Summit. The Summit brings together global leaders in agri-food tech industry and ecosystem enablers, corporates, and regulators, allowing them to network, forge partnerships, and collaborate to create solutions for the ongoing and ever-increasing food crisis. 

By 2050, the world population is projected to reach 10 billion people, and the current food production practices simply cannot keep up with the increasing population. The Summit explored the development and implementation of various new food technologies that could solve this issue, from insect, plant based, precision fermentation, and cell-based protein tech, to vertical farming and other farming monitoring technologies. 

Shirley states, “When it comes to novel food alternatives, price, taste, and nutrition are the top priorities for their worldwide acceptance. Harmony is lucky to be in a space in which the bar set is fairly low. We could easily match and most importantly surpass the quality of existing products that cause allergies in 1 out of 5 babies.” 

The expectation for plant-based and cell-based technology to reach price parity with traditional food production practices without an ecosystem infrastructure expansion that will allow for the scale up of these technologies is unrealistic, which is what makes events like the Agri-Food Innovation Summit so important. In the case of Harmony, Shirley remarks, “We recognize that there would inevitably be scale up challenges. Fortunately, proteins make up a relatively small proportion of breast milk when compared to other foods sources, like alt-meat. While these proteins are incredibly important for the overall nutrition of breast milk, their small proportion makes our dependence on novel ingredients in our final product much lower than other alternative protein products.” 

While many of these new food production technologies are incredibly important for feeding the growing population overall, infants have a very limited set of foods they can consume. It is incredibly important that we develop new solutions that can sustainably provide better nutrition to the increasing number of babies worldwide, and Harmony is proud to be ushering in the technologies to make this industry change happen. 

To learn more about Asia-Pacific Agri-Food Innovation Summit, visit their website here.