The Prize

To save the Food Planet, we must accelerate change.

The Food Planet Prize differs from other awards in many ways, not just because of its size.  

The two things that we believe are most unusual about us, and of which we are probably the proudest, are the types of projects we award and how we decide on our winners.

First of all, unlike most prizes, we primarily seek to award those who will succeed, and radically change the world for the better, if only they get the chance—rather than those who have already succeeded. If you think about most other prizes, they often work the other way around. This isn’t a bad thing, but is perhaps a little bit inefficient if your goal is to catalyze rapid change.

Second, we believe that the only way to transform our food system into one that can sustainably support us in harmony with the environment is to work together across the whole food value chain. People tend to agree on this in principle, though almost everywhere you look, actions fail to reflect this belief.

For us, the need for a holistic focus sits at the center of everything we do, and our vetting process is designed to represent the whole food system. This is illustrated by our jury, with its equal split in representation between people working at the cutting edge of scientific research, policy, business, and practical work in food. The vote of a world-leading climate scientist, a farmer, or a chef carries equal weight in deciding who will win the Prize.

The Prize Process

How we evaluate our nominees and select our winner, the short version.

• All nominations are registered through the nominations form on our website. The nominations form is open all year around. However, as our selection process takes slightly over 12 months, to stand a higher chance of winning in the next year, submit your nominations before May of the current year. Every nomination submitted through the website is received by our nominations team and gets evaluated based on publicly available information against criteria such as potential impact, evidence, and relevancy for the food planet.
• We handle about 1000 nominations a year. Once you are nominated, we may keep your nomination for multiple years and track your initiative’s progress. This means a nominee is in the running not just for just the year they were nominated, but for as long as our nominations team believes there is a chance that the nominee could prove to be a winner.
• The nominees are inserted into our Master grid, which is a list of 400 spots, each reflecting a unique combination of parameters based on factors such as the geographical location of the nominee, in which part of the food system they operate, what type of innovation they are presenting, and whether they are commercial or non-commercial. The goal is that we will move to the next stage of the evaluation process with a set of nominees representing the whole world, the whole food system, and a wide variety of innovations.
• From the 400-grid, our nominations team proceed by selecting their 50 top picks, still working to ensure this selection remains representative of the whole food system. Every nominee in this top-50 list – which forms the basis of our longlist – is then evaluated more closely. We contact each of these the nominees with a set of questions and spend more time trying to really understand what they are all about, how big their potential impact could be, and how likely it is that they will succeed.
• When the nominations team is completely convinced of the quality of these nominees, they add them to the longlist. The team then shares the longlisted initiatives and all the research material with the Curt Bergfors Foundation prize committee, which consists of jury co-chairs Johan Rockström and Magnus Nilsson and board member Line Gordon. Their job is to examine the selection, give feedback if needed, and finally approve the longlist from the perspective of the Foundation.
• When the list is approved two things will happen. The first is that we publish it along with a short editorial text about each of the selected nominees on our website. The second thing is that the nominations team will start their selection process to turn the longlist into a short list of roughly 10 of the sharpest contestants that will eventually be put in front of the jury.
• When the nominations team and the prize committee can agree on up to 10 candidates (this can take quite some time and discussion), we enter the final stage of evaluation. This includes a full due diligence process carried out by an external auditing company where we look at each nominee to make sure that they are able to receive 2 million USD if they were to win. For each nominee, we also commission one or two external experts in the initiative’s field of work to conduct full scientific reviews of the initiative’s claims and evidence and to provide an assessment of the quality of the team behind it. These evaluators are often top-ranking academics but in some instances, for example when we are evaluating commercial ideas, senior corporate leaders. The evaluators are anonymous and have no direct contact with the nominees; all questions are passed through our nominations team to not risk compromising the integrity of the evaluation.
• At the same time as the due diligence and scientific evaluations takes place, we commission an investigative journalist and a photographer to visit each nominee to conduct further research and to write a story about what they do and the context in which the nominee operates. These journalists do not get access to our own research; they are asked to produce their work independently to reflect their unique perspectives and contribute these perspectives to the growing amount material we compile about the nominees.
• When all the research and background material has been delivered, it is passed on to the Foundation’s board with the question of whether they can agree that each of the suggested shortlisted candidates could be a worthy winner of the Food Planet Prize. The reason for this is that the board ultimately decides the winner, and we do not want to risk putting any nominee in front of the jury that the board would then reject if the jury were to recommend them as the winner.
• All approved nominees are revealed as shortlisted initiatives and the research material about them is shared with the jury. The articles about each nominee and the photographs of their work are also used to present them to the world through our website and that of our publishing partner Roads & Kingdoms.
• After studying the material and learning about each nominee during several internal meetings, the jury congregates in Stockholm together with the shortlisted initiatives. The initiatives each gets a few minutes to tell the jury in-person why they believe they should win.
• In the morning of the day the winner is announced, the jury meets for the last time and conducts a vote that results in a recommendation of who should win the prize that year.
• The board formally decides the winner and we share the news with the world.

Read more about how we evaluate our nominees and select our winners