Beyond the plate: Hong Kong's food tech innovators cultivate a sustainable future
04:38
Top chef in Hong Kong joins hands with local food tech pioneers to make dining sustainable
Top chef in Hong Kong joins hands with local food tech pioneers to make dining sustainable
Today's advanced food production methods allow people to access a larger variety of produce from around the world, but this has also brought about issues such as food wastage and bigger carbon footprints from transport.
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Fortunately, Hong Kong companies and start-ups are embracing technology to come up with pioneering solutions to these issues, thereby making the food supply and its consumption more sustainable. The number of these innovative food tech businesses in Hong Kong has grown significantly in recent years, from 40 in 2022 to 106 in 2023.
That is good news for Joris Rousseau, executive chef of Feuille, a one-Michelin-star French restaurant in Hong Kong that serves 'nature-inspired' cuisine.
Being a chef who likes to think out of the box, Rousseau often seeks out unusual ingredients to experiment with. When he heard about Breer – a Hong Kong company dedicated to upcycling unsold, uneaten and surplus bread by turning it into craft beer – he decided to pay a visit.
'They inspire me, because I love to reuse bread from the bakery,' Rousseau says. 'I love this type of mentality.'
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Breer's co-founder and CEO, Anushka Purohit, recalls how she and her business partner came up with the idea while they were still students at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. They were celebrating the end of exams at a bar with some beers when they made the connection that both beer and bread contain barley.
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