Innovation platform aims to make vegetable concepts succeed

Together with The Food Foundry, an organization that supports promising food start-ups with scale-up and route-to-market, HAS initiated the Innovation Platform Vegetables. Recently 2 new partners were welcomed: corporate and educational caterers Vitam and Appèl Catering.

The platform's goal: to help the Dutch eat healthier at more times throughout the day with tasty, attractive and usable vegetable concepts, devised and developed by students. "There has already been a lot of research done that shows that good nutrition is hugely important," says Herman Peppelenbos of HAS University of Applied Sciences. "Sufficient fruits and vegetables are an essential part of this. Now that we are dealing with Covid-19 you see that people with health problems, which are related to an unhealthy lifestyle, have a higher risk of serious complaints when infected and need a longer recovery period. So it's very timely to look at healthy nutrition."

Making it to market

Joris Leferink of The Food Foundry adds: "In the graduation year of Food Innovation students, many creative concepts are developed in which vegetables often play the leading role. Despite the fact that these concepts are attractive and they regularly win prizes, most of them never make it to the market. Based on our knowledge, experience and network, we want to work together to ensure that this does happen."

The future

At the moment the Vegetable Innovation Platform consists of HAS University of Applied Sciences, The Food Foundry, Vitam and Appél Catering. In time, the organizations would like to expand it with more partners to jointly ensure a higher vegetable consumption in the Netherlands.  

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