On Thursday, March 28, the Chicago Connectory hosted Sente Foundry’s ‘Innovation in Food Tech Meetup’. This event focused on how innovation and data is key to success in the food tech space.
The event began with a presentation by U.S. Director and Designer at CLEVER°FRANKE, Bob Corporaal. Their company works on improving client efficiency with data-driven tools and experiences. They bring data to farming with their mobile and desktop platform, Aker. The Aker process involves drones being flown over a client’s fields and turning the data collected into an easy-to-use map. This map then shows users where crops are less healthy and what they can do in order to get the most out of their land.
Next, Willemijn Schneyder discussed how he created SwipeGuide to improve traditional paper instruction manuals. Ease-of-use and understandability of paper instructions were problems when it came to Heineken’s changeover times. Changeover is the process of converting a factory line machine from producing one product to producing another. For Heineken, this process took about 5 hours.