Thank you for your interest in learning more about our family Foundation. 

Our core value is that everyone must always have equitable access to safe, nutritious, appealing, affordable, and trusted food that also improves personal and planetary health. We are convinced that passionate teams of scientists, engineers, and innovators collaborating across disciplines and cultures can create highly impactful solutions to improve the health of people and the planet. 

On several journeys to Sub-Saharan Africa with other partner organizations, we saw many smallholder farmers living in extreme poverty, spending most of their days just to provide food for their already undernourished and stunted children. Chronic hunger and extreme poverty were ubiquitous. On one trip with Partners in Food Solutions, we met one farmer who was the provider for an extended family of about 25.  He had a tiny plot of land, a beehive, and two chickens. When asked if he had one wish, he said it would be two more chickens to provide more food as a protein source for his family. This short experience in particular and, seeing up-close the wide prevalence of poverty and severe lack of nutrition security was staggering.

The fact that a world of chronic hunger, severe undernutrition, and extreme poverty affecting over 840 million people is only hours away from a world of abundance where over 30% of food is wasted, and where rates of obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related non-communicable diseases continue to rise, is unacceptable and was a call to action for us.

Game-changing ideas at an early stage can lead to transformational change when scaled. The need for transforming changes in our global food system and its many subsystems sharpened the focus of our Foundation: to seed and support the creation and acceleration of human-centered ideas and innovations that have high impact potential at scale on the health of people and the environment and consider the consumer as a key enabler of a flourishing food system.

We are very fortunate to work with amazing partners and will learn and refine our approach as we go forward. We are determined to create a strong and powerful innovation pipeline leading to solutions to be multiplied and scaled. While the challenges of the global food system are daunting, we are convinced that teams of passionate scientists, engineers, innovators, and entrepreneurs across disciplines and cultures will create innovations that will catalyze the transforming changes that are urgently needed.

We are honored to help contribute to enabling those changes.

Dr.-Ing. Bernhard van Lengerich, Founder, and CEO of the Seeding The Future Foundation