We spent the last week at Nordic Food Industry, the new gathering place for the food sector. It is a brand-new fair at Svenska Mässan to highlight innovation and sustainability. As the fair took place simultaneously with both Scanautomatic and Processteknik, some of the most significant industry events of the year, it was an excellent opportunity for us to showcase the true core of Mycorena: FoodTech. 

By showcasing our innovation and technology, we could display the different aspects of Mycorena. At fairs, we are often represented by our business or marketing team. This time around, we tried something different. 

The day before, we spent almost the entire day building the booth and preparing the area. The booth we had was a new setting for us, and it was exciting to see a new concept come to life where we had aimed for a techy and minimalistic design.

After many hours of building lightboxes, making design decisions, and snack time, the Mycorena vision came to life.

If you visited our booth, you could find a broad range of team members from Mycorena. We decided to have a mix of our different departments, such as marketing, business, R&D, HR, and production, to provide answers to any questions about Mycorena.

Most importantly, we had great technical representation to supply our tech-interested visitors with great insights into our unique technology and processes. 

Besides networking with the team members, you also got to see some of our latest innovations - such as our M.E.A.T. and fungi-based fat solution. Furthermore, we also offered the visitors a taste of our raw mycoprotein, Promyc, to demonstrate what a boring ingredient it truly is. All these elements captured people’s interest, and it led to many interesting discussions and conversations - both with people familiar with Mycorena but also new connections. 

Our booth was next to the Innovation Stage, where exciting talks and seminars were held throughout the fair. Our very own CIO, Paulo, took the stage to participate in a discussion on processing plant-based and other vegan foods to increase their nutritional value. He spoke of the many superior advantages of mycoprotein and our specific mycelium strain, which also sparked exciting conversations. Several spectators in the crowd commented on the incredibly fast growth rate of the fungi, and a few expressed awe at the ingenuity of feeding fungi nutrients to be adopted into their composition. 

We ended the first day of the fair with an after-work event at our facilities at MIND to introduce our collaboration with Lantmännen. It was a great event with many different people and companies from the food industry sector, and we connected with both new and familiar faces. We did a bit of mingling, had some sparkling wine and delicious Promyc product samples from our collaboration with Lantmännen, and invited all of our guests on a tour of our production facility for more insight into how Promyc is made. 

The highlights of the fair were the many interesting seminars and talks, for instance, a discussion on fermentation which our CTO Frida participated in to discuss the fermentation scale-up process and its possibilities. 

However, the fair focused less on the food industry than we had hoped. We were one of few in the food sector, while most were purely tech-oriented. Many of our team members enjoyed wandering around the fair looking at shiny machines and came back gushing about micro-bioreactors, safety valves, pH probes, and pumps for viscous liquids. From the tech point of view, the fair was ‘an engineer's dream’, according to some. 

It would have been interesting to connect with companies more invested in technology for the food industry specifically, applicable to both the production process and products. Even though the fair was not exactly what we expected, it was great to see Gothenburg profiled as a hub for tech and innovation. 
 

With Mycorena being in the middle of scaling up and facing quite forward expansion plans, it was an excellent opportunity to reflect on our future needs and what we might need to expand at the rate we plan to. So, from the tech point of view, the fair was inspiring and rewarding. Not only for where we currently are but for seeing where we are going and visualising our needs, and making connections for the future.

We look forward to the next time and, hopefully, more FoodTech and inspiring innovations.