business – FoodArchitecture

From Trend to Recipe: How AI Is Reshaping Food Innovation Pipelines

A new food trend rarely starts in a laboratory. It starts on a smartphone, on social media feeds or in in product reviews. A flavour gains attention, spreads across platforms, and sometimes disappears again before a traditional food R&D process has even reached its first prototype. In an industry built around multi-year development cycles, this…

The risks of industrie 4.0

Industry 4.0 stands for connected machines, automated processes, and data-driven decisions. These technologies promise higher efficiency and competitiveness. But they also create a serious risk: if digital systems are not protected properly, advanced manufacturing can fail completely. In technology-based companies, data is a core asset. This includes customer and supplier data, production parameters, formulations, financial…

The Death of the Business Plan (As We Knew It): Crafting Strategy in the Era of Degenerative Volatility

There is a peculiar cruelty in asking entrepreneurs and investors to produce five-year business plans while the civilisational scaffolding beneath us buckles and groans. Yet this is precisely what we continue to do—spreadsheets extending confidently into 2030, IRR calculations dancing obliviously over tectonic fractures, SWOT analyses treating systemic collapse as a line-item “threat” to be…

Speed, Sustainability, and the Smart P&L: The Connected Future of High-Volume Foodservice

From pre-order apps to robotic fryers—how integrating the full tech stack is revolutionizing Roadside, Travel Retail, and QSRs. In the high-velocity worlds of Roadside “Foodvenience,” Travel Retail, and Quick Service Restaurants (QSR), the customer mission is distinct: speed is currency. Whether it’s a commuter grabbing a coffee at a highway stop or a family ordering…

From Transformation to Regeneration: Why Leadership Must Continue Evolving

Transformational leadership has long been celebrated as the antidote to stagnation. In a world defined by disruption, leaders are expected to innovate, adapt, and guide organizations through change. One compelling articulation of this logic comes from Tilo Hühn’s work on transformational leadership, which frames leadership as the bridge between exploitation and exploration—between what already works…

Just-in-Time in the Supermarket: How Predictive Analytics Cuts Food Waste and Logistics Costs

Picture this: strawberries are sold out in the morning — yet two crates end up in markdown or the waste bin at another store that same evening. Both things can happen inside the same retail network, in the same week, sometimes even on the same day. The root cause is rarely “bad execution.” Most of…

The role of AI-driven shelf-life prediction systems in reducing food waste

Food waste is one of the great inefficiencies of our food system: roughly one-fifth of food available to consumers is wasted at household, retail and food-service levels, accounting for a sizeable share of global greenhouse-gas emissions and lost value along the supply chain (UNFCCC 2024). Cutting that waste requires better decisions about what to keep,…

A Digital Assistant for Community-Supported Agriculture

Freeing Time for Fieldwork and Community Solidarity-based Agriculture (Solawi) is built on trust, transparency, and shared responsibility. Producers and consumers jointly negotiate needs and contributions, and prices are meant to cover real agricultural costs rather than follow market logic. For many, the appeal of Solawi lies in collective workdays in the fields — reconnecting with…

Digital Farming Is Only as Strong as the Systems Behind It

Digitalisation in agriculture is often discussed as a global transition, as if farms everywhere are moving along the same technological paths. My own experience suggests something more nuanced. Having grown up in the Dominican Republic and now living and studying in Switzerland, I have come to realise that agricultural digitalisation is not simply about adopting…