Published on October 28, 2019

On Thursday, October 24 Wenda was in Bologna as a guest of Scuderia – Future Food Urban CooLab in the framework of Food is a conversation, a series of talks about many topics connected to food and innovation with one or more international experts, moderated by Francesco Castellana – Community Manager at Future Food Institute, an an Italian-based non-profit with global horizons that aims to build a more equitable world through enlightening a world-class breed of innovators, boosting entrepreneurial potential and improving agri-food expertise and tradition. The conversations preceded a debate between spokespersons from some companies and startups operating in the Food industry, and a thematic networking moment. 

The event is part of Food Innovation Valley – an initiative promoted by Fondazione FICO and Future Food Institute with the contribution of Regione Emilia-Romagna – which was created to answer the needs of business development and technological transfer of sectoral expertise signaled by organizations in the territory, making l’Emilia-Romagna an internationally strategic player in the Food industry and in the enhancement of the Italian food heritage. In the context of this initiative, some theme-based meetings called Food is a conversation have been organized – they were built by Fondazione FICO and Future Food Institute together with the partners Legacoop Bologna, Vicoo and Impronta Etica.

 

The topic of this event was Food Safety: one of the idiomatic expressions of Food innovation ecosystem, it describes the combination of Food management, preparation and storage processes of which are necessary to prevent potential diseases related to Food. The world of Food Safety includes the whole supply chain from production to distribution, and this implies that the Food’s productive context – from agriculture to industry, from the small producer to multinational organizations – fully guarantees consumers with healthy, riskless final products. In a geographical-productive area such as Emilia Romagna, where huge amounts of food are produced and exported every year, many companies provide not only quality product for the table, but also equipment, natural packaging and solutions to protect Food in each step of the supply chain, from production to final consumption. A region which possesses a great gastronomic tradition and an economic fortune tied to Agrifood production and commerce must protect its prosperity also through technological development and innovative ideas regarding Food Safety, an essential element to ensure Food quality. 

And it is exactly on this topic that Food is a Conversation: Food Safety engages, an event we at Wenda took part into with Mattia Nanetti, cofounder, COO and Head of Go-to-Market and Fundraising. Together with some members of other companies and startups invited, among which Cooki, Neurality and Siblex. Mattia joined the conversation and discussed the way Wenda’s Platform can help Food&Beverage supply chain actors to face Food Safety challenges that arise in the contemporary global market. By talking about the innovation processes characterizing the Italian market and the way you can extract value from them, Mattia said: “We are a Country that produces not only Food, but also technology: we just have to combine the skills and build innovation.” 

 

For Wenda, this was a really interesting event which dealt with very relevant issues such as sustainability, the meaning of Food in everyday life and the practices of Food Safety that can be deployed to fight the occurrence of diseases connected to nutrition and the imperfect management of products across the supply chain. You can thus increase awareness about how much the improvement of Food supply chain processes through innovation is important to deliver high-quality products, preserving the freshness prescribed by Food Safety guidelines.

 

Wenda Food Integrity Management Hub

We at Wenda, an Italian startup backed by European investors, aim to contribute with our technological innovations to fix some of the issues affecting Food&Beverage actors, from producers to retailers, logistics and insurance companies. We developed Wenda Food Integrity Management Hub, a digital platform sold Saas with an annual subscription dedicated to all the Food&Beverage actors who handle or manage perishable or sensitive products.

We help Retailers to get fresher and safer food at shelf level, increasing actual freshness and transparency perception, and decreasing Food Safety management costs. All this thanks to the only Enterprise digital Platform managing shelf life information along the supply chain and across multiple devices and systems. The Platform manages all the product integrity information – among which cold chain, chemical tests, traceability, expiry date, shelf-life – in an advanced, easily accessible way and from a single control point on the web. It delivers:

• Overview of integrity analytics and hazard points along which the cold chain risks to break off;
• Supply chain collaboration with differential access levels to journey data, to share the latter real-time with clients, logistics,and quality departments, insurance companies, regulatory bodies;
• Paperless sharing via a wallet in cloud to upload travel papers, temperature and product quality certifications data, for each shipment or storage;
• Universal IoT Platform for the integration and interoperability with different traceability systems and data logger, which are constantly evolving.

 

Wenda was accelerated by UniCredit, as well as by Maersk, Digital Magics and Intesa Sanpaolo. Also, Wenda is supported by a German investor with data science experience, and is developing predictive algorithms to calculate product spoilage probabilities when it is shipped or stored in the warehouse. Currently, Wenda is attending Rockstart’s acceleration program, a program by an international company which supports and accompanies towards success the best startups operating in different industries, among which AgriFood. Furthermore, some prescriptive algorithms are under development: on the basis of the data gathered up to now, they will be able to show the best company decision when particular conditions or events that might disrupt the smooth flow of the product in the supply chain arise.

For any information, to get to know us or to schedule a demo with the Wenda Food Integrity Management Hub, we invite you to visit our website.