We are so proud, happy, and deeply honored to present the Food Planet Prize to this year’s winner.  

NitroCapt received the world’s biggest environmental award on June 13 in Stockholm, Sweden, for their exceptional contributions and potential to disrupt the global nitrogen fertilizer industry. Here is the jury’s motivation:  

“Adequate amounts of nutritious food for all people in the world can only be provided through a sustainable use of land, water, and plant nutrients. The global food system is the world’s largest cause for breaching the nutrient planetary boundary through inequitable overuse of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers. Furthermore, nitrogen fertilizers are produced through energy-intensive processes that consume fossil fuels and emit large amounts of greenhouse gases. 

Through a major innovation, nitrogen fertilizer can now be produced by splitting nitrogen from the air with plasma technology simply needing green electricity as input. 

This technology reduces the use of energy tenfold, can be produced locally in smaller units, and avoids fossil-fuels entirely, producing a nitrate fertilizer that can improve soil health and be used sustainably by farmers across the world.” 

The 2025 Food Planet Prize winner was awarded 2 million dollars in funding.  

Gustaf Forsberg, CEO and Founder of NitroCapt, commented: 

“NitroCapt’s mission is to decarbonize the nitrogen fertilizer industry. The current fossil-based process has reached its end point. We can also contribute to increased food production in areas that today have difficulties producing sufficient amounts. We are just about to finalize our industrial-scale pilot, and we have fertilizer in the field, but we’re still not at the scale where we want to be.  

This Prize will be very important for us to bring our technology to the stage where we can start making a difference.” 

Read our feature article about NitroCapt here!

We’re thrilled to announce this year’s shortlist: Out of over 1,000 nominations, 6 groundbreaking initiatives have made it to the final stage and the winner will be revealed on June 13^th! These initiatives represent some of the most innovative efforts worldwide to reduce the environmental footprint of our food systems. They offer revolutionary ways to protect crops and increase yields, a low-emission method to produce fertilizer, tools to slash food waste, and more. 

Each finalist has been carefully selected through a thorough review process led by the Food Planet Prize’s in-house nominations team, with expert evaluations from leading academics. 

The following initiatives comprise the 2025 shortlist: 

• Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies – Uses fungal endophytes and microbes to help crops resist climate stress, cut fertilizer use, and boost yields. 
• Astungkara Way – Reinvents rice farming with regenerative methods to increase productivity and enhance farmer livelihoods in an ecologically beneficial way. 
• NitroCapt – Develops zero-emission fertilizers using air and plasma, reducing climate impact.
• Pride on our Plates – Tackles massive food waste in China’s catering sector by empowering small businesses with data-driven insights and behavioral strategies. 
• Semion – Fights pesticide resistance with plant-based defenses that protect yields and reduce chemical harm.
• Virtual Irrigation Academy – Equips smallholder farmers with smart soil sensors to save water and increase food production.

The shortlisted initiatives will come to Stockholm in June to meet with the Food Planet Prize’s international jury. Together with Roads & Kingdoms, we’ve crafted in-depth articles to bring their stories to life—visit the links above to learn more. 

Congratulations to this year’s finalists. We hope you find them as inspiring as we do! 

After rounds of screening, research, and evaluation of nearly a thousand nominations – our prize team has identified 39 initiatives that stand out from the rest. The Food Planet Prize 2025 longlist is the first major step towards finding a winner. It also presents new, inspiring possibilities for our challenged food systems. 

This year’s longlist contains initiatives from 23 countries across six continents—from Uganda to the UK, from China to Colombia. These initiatives illustrate how innovations can be technical in nature but also social or nature-based. They show how impressive ideas can come from high-tech companies and grassroots NGOs alike. Our longlisted initiatives provide the world with carbon sequestration, improved soil health, clean water, food waste reductions, and many other benefits to the food planet. 

As many of you may know, this is one step among many. The next step is to deeply dive into the longlisted initiatives, in an effort to create a top-notch shortlist. Our prize team are eager to see which initiatives can have the biggest impact – and if they can scale globally and quickly.   

Come spring, we will present the shortlisted initiatives, and in June our jury will select a winner. Only one initiative can win The Food Planet Prize 2025, but we hope our work will draw attention to all the nominees and help them grow. We don’t change the way we eat and produce food in isolation – this is a mission that requires many different initiatives working together.  

Keep an eye out here on our website and on Instagram, where we will reveal more about each of the longlisted initiatives. We hope they will inspire you as much as they inspire us.  

Lastly, nominations are always open. If you know of someone you think should win the Food Planet Prize, nominate them here. It only takes three minutes, but it could change the world. 

The longlisted initiatives for the 2025 Food Planet Prize are:

Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies (USA)  
Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies uses fungal endophytes and microbes to improve crop health. 

Afrotym (Uganda) 
Afrotym makes a granulate from organic waste that keeps soils moist during dry spells. 

AgriNatif (Haiti) 
AgriNatif blends local traditional knowledge and regenerative practices to empower Haitian communities.   

ANDFOODS (New Zealand) 
ANDFOODS makes dairy alternatives through a lentils-based fermentation process. 

Astungkara Way (Indonesia) 
Astungkara Way trains farmers to grow rice in a regenerative way, incorporating ducks, fish, a floating fern, and border crops. 

Aquatic Foods: Post-harvest losses and food waste reduction in Zambia 
WorldFish implements an initiative in Zambia to increase food safety and improve nutrition security by reducing post-harvest losses in fish value chains. 

BioFiltro (USA, Chile, Peru) 
BioFiltro uses earthworms and microbes to remove contaminants from organic waste, producing both clean water and vermicompost.  

Cellular Agriculture (UK) 
Cellular Agriculture maximizes production efficiency of cultivated proteins through hollow fiber membrane systems.   

Climate Smart Farming Program (Australia) 
Through this program, Farmers for Climate Action champions climate-smart farming solutions and economy-wide policy action.  

Comida do Amanhã Institute (Brazil) 
Comida do Amanhã supports the transition to healthy, inclusive, biodiverse, and sustainable food systems in Brazil and beyond. 

CuanTec (UK) 
CuanTec repurposes shellfish waste to make the multi-functional biopolymer chitosan.  

D-Olivette (Nigeria) 
The 1,000,000 Closed-Loop Farms Project provides communities with electricity, cooking fuel, fertilizer, and feed by turning waste into biogas. 

Enset Food Security Initiative (Kenya and Ethiopia) 
Enset, known as “false banana”, is an Ethiopian drought-resilient crop helping to provide nutrition and social equity. 

Essential (Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania) 
Essential tackles malnutrition by turning agricultural byproducts into Sub-Saharan Africa’s first biomanufactured protein. 

Food Frontier (Australia) 
Food Frontier promotes alternative proteins through industry expertise, dialogue, and policy advocacy.  

Gastromotiva (Brazil, Mexico) 
Gastromotiva uses gastronomy as a catalyst for social transformation–improving food security, income generation, and sustainable development.  

GrowBox (South Africa) 
GrowBox brings food gardens and agricultural skills to the communities that most need it. 

Le Lionceau (Senegal) 
Lionceau combats food insecurity and malnutrition in Africa by producing nutritious, locally sourced baby food while promoting agroforestry.  

Leanpath (USA, UK, China) 
Leanpath has developed technology for food waste prevention and measurement in the food service sector.  

Millow (Sweden) 
Millow produces tastier and more efficient vegan foods with dry fermentation technology.  

Mushuk Yuyay (Ecuador) 
Mushuk Yuyay promotes the food sovereignty, agrobiodiversity, and ancient culture of the Kañari people. 

My Food is African (Uganda) 
My Food is African levers agroecology and indigenous crops to build continent-wide food sovereignty.  

NanoFreeze (Colombia) 
NanoFreeze uses bio-nanotechnology to provide low-carbon refrigeration solutions. 

NitroCapt (Sweden) 
NitroCapt makes energy-efficient fertilizer through plasma-produced nitrate. 

OneFarm Share (South Africa) 
OneFarm Share prevents food waste and improves local value chains by redistributing surplus produce and developing small-scale farms.  

Planet-Friendly School Meals (UK) 
The Planet-Friendly School Meals initiative supports countries to adopt school meals that improve diet quality and act as a catalyst for food systems transformation. 

Pride on our Plates (China) 
Pride on our Plates empowers China’s micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises with food waste reduction solutions and behavioral insights.  

Renewable Energy for Gendered Agribusiness Program (REAP) (Zimbabwe) 
REAP empowers women through climate resilient food value chains.  

ProVeg School Plates Program (UK) 
School Plates program aims to revolutionize school meals by promoting planet-friendly and healthier eating habits among children. 

Semion (Argentina) 
Semion replaces chemical pesticides by activating plants’ own defense mechanisms.  

SRI 2030 (UK) 
SRI-2030 promotes SRI, an agronomic framework that raises yields and lowers the climate impact of rice production. 

Svensk Kolinlagring (Sweden) 
Svensk Kolinlagring works with carbon farming as a lever to create systemic change in the food system.  

The Atlas (USA) 
The Atlas is a global tool that provides legal analysis, policy recommendations, and technical assistance to reduce food loss and waste. 

The Postharvest Education Foundation (USA) 
The Postharvest Education Foundation uses e-learning to spread the use of low-cost technologies that keep food from going to waste.  

The Virtual Irrigation Academy (Australia) 
The Virtual Irrigation Academy provides an innovative soil sensor that helps small-scale farmers manage water better. 

Thrive for Good (Kenya) 
Thrive for Good makes nutritious food accessible by helping families and communities start their own gardens.  

TurtleTree Labs (USA) 
TurtleTree produces animal-free dairy proteins and is finding ways to repurpose the byproduct of the production process. 

Upcycled Food (USA) 
Upcycled Food accelerates the upcycled food economy by unleashing innovation and building networks to stop food waste. 

Zero Foodprint Asia (Hong Kong) 
Zero Foodprint Asia works with restaurants to fund a transition to regenerative agriculture. 

C40 Food Systems wins the Food Planet Prize, the $2-million environmental award, for shifting millions of meals in major cities to be healthier and more sustainable for people and the planet

The Curt Bergfors Foundation is honored to announce that C40 Food Systems, a global network, was awarded the Food Planet Prize, the world’s biggest environmental award on Friday, 28 June. This recognition highlights their exceptional contributions and strong potential to transform urban food systems to benefit people and the planet.

As urbanization continues to surge, 80% of all food produced globally is expected to be consumed in cities by 2050. Moreover, food is currently the biggest source of consumption-based emissions in major cities (13-20%).

C40’s Food Systems Network works directly with its 50+ member cities from around the world to make it easier for residents to eat food that is good for people, the planet, and prosperity by developing healthy, equitable, and accessible food systems that also reduce food loss and waste. 

Through the C40 Good Cities Accelerator, 16 cities worldwide are working to deliver sustainable food policies and achieve a “Planetary Health Diet” for all by 2030, informed by the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health. The cities participating in the Good Food Cities accelerator are Stockholm, London, Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Oslo, Copenhagen, New York City, Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles, Lima, Guadalajara, Seoul, Quezon City and Tokyo. These cities collectively serve over 500 million meals. Though every city is shaped by local context, good solutions can be quickly scaled and refined to suit other cities facing similar challenges. 

“Receiving the Food Planet Prize is a tremendous honour for all of us here at C40. This recognition reaffirms our commitment to transforming food systems locally and globally and inspires us to continue our dedicated work towards a healthier and more equitable food future for all C40 cities and beyond,” said Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, Co-Chair of C40.

“As the Mayor of London, I understand the vital role food systems play in our city. Mayors are pivotal in ensuring schoolchildren receive nutritious meals, all residents have access to healthy and sustainable food, and we actively work to reduce food waste. That’s why C40’s recognition with the Food Planet Prize is such a great honor. This award strengthens our resolve to drive a global transformation, ensuring everyone can access good, healthy food,” added Mayor Sadiq Khan, Co-Chair of C40.

In awarding the Prize to C40 Food Systems, the Food Planet Prize jury commented:

“Cities, where 70% of all food in the world is consumed today, play a pivotal role in the global transformation to healthy and sustainable food systems. C40, a global network of nearly 100 mayors of the world’s leading cities, has a long track-record in climate action and increasingly food systems, and can provide city-led leverage towards positive tipping points that can radically shift the global trajectory towards a sustainable food future.

In particular, the Food Planet Prize jury sees that C40, a locally anchored global force, can work with cities across the world, supporting them in areas of food policy, public procurement and school food programs to reduce food loss and waste, and improve governance. C40 has a unique opportunity to build synergies with other urban sustainability networks on food and provide a city-led global acceleration for our food system.”

Read our feature article about C40 Food Systems work here!

The Food Planet Prize Shortlist 2024 is here! This year, seven projects made it to the finals, and the winner will be selected on June 28 here in Stockholm! 

The shortlisted projects represent a diverse range of initiatives and showcase groundbreaking approaches to tackling the environmental footprint of our food systems: 

• Aquagrain (UK) 
• C40 Food Systems (global, HQ in London and New York)
• NovFeed (Tanzania)
• Pumpkin Plus (Bangladesh), 
• The Rich Earth Institute (USA)
• ThermoSeed (Sweden) (Acanova & Lantmännen Bio Agri)
• Transfarmation (USA) 

Each project underwent a thorough evaluation by the Food Planet Prize in-house nominations team, followed by academic reviews by leading external experts. 

In partnership with the Roads&Kingdoms magazine, we created a dedicated article – on the winners&nominees page. Enjoy the read! Each is an exciting story about how brilliant minds all over the world try to lessen the environmental damage caused by the way we eat. 

We congratulate the finalists! 

We are The Curt Bergfors Food Planet Prize and each year we award $2 million to a single winning project that significantly reduces the environmental impact of the way we eat. Our vision is a well-nourished world population on a thriving planet.

Unlike most other awards, we focus on future impact rather than past success.

Right now we are looking for more groundbreaking projects to run for the 2025 Prize!

The prize can be awarded to individuals or organizations in both commercial and non-commercial settings. You can nominate your own initiative or someone else’s. 

Nominations are always welcome, but as our selection process takes just over a year, to stand a chance of winning in 2025, submit your nominations before May 10, 2024.

Nominating a project takes just three minutes but could change the world! 

So do not hesitate and submit your nominations now!

Announcing the 48 initiatives in the running for the 2024 Food Planet Prize 

There is excitement in the air at the Food Planet Prize office, today is a very special day. It is the day when we confirm and share with you our longlist for the 2024 prize. Out of the roughly one thousand nominees that were registered through our website and examined by our team this year, these forty-eight initiatives represent the very best and most exciting. The initiatives come from all corners of the world and represent a huge variety of elements that together make up our food system, just the way we like it. 

Our team will now look even deeper into these longlisted initiatives. Really getting to know them, trying to understand what they are all about, how big the potential impact would be if they succeed, and how likely it is for this to happen. In April we will have identified 8-10 shortlisted initiatives out of this selection to be presented to our jury, each one a worthy winner from the perspective of The Curt Bergfors Foundation. 

New for this year is that during the first few months of 2024, we will share some of the research material we produce on the longlisted nominees with you. This will happen in the shape of short articles published here on our website and will also be publicized through our social media channels. 

Even if there can be only one winner of the world’s biggest environmental award in the end, all of these nominees do something amazing in their own right, and they all contribute to the urgently needed transformation of our food system. And we really want to tell you about them so that perhaps you can support them too, help them become more successful, or at the very least become inspired by their work.

Lastly, nominations are always open. If you have someone in mind that you think should win the Food Planet Prize, nominate them here through the website. It literally takes three minutes and it could change the world.

The longlisted initiatives for the 2024 Food Planet Prize are:

Africa Wealth Initiative

Agpreneur

AgUnity

Aquagrain – More crops less water

Auric Panache

Biotic

C40 Food Systems Network

Champions 12.3

Choco

Community forestry: Protecting Colombian Amazon forest, local food security and regional climate (FCDS)

Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO)

Desert Promise

Eachmile Technologies

Farms not Arms

Feeding the World – A holistic approach to rural community development

FoodNerve

Food Systems Dashboard

Fundación Semillas de Vida

Good Food Institute

GreenBox

Inga Tree Foundation

Kelp Blue

MiTerro

Mountain Partnership Products Initiative

Nabahya Food Institute

NAMBOLA: Appreciating past sustainable practices

NovFeed

Nutritious Foods Financing Facility “N3F” Programme

Nuvilab Scanner,

One Planet Plate

Oorja solutions – Climate-Smart Farming Services

Powering Agriculture

Pumpkin Plus

Rich Earth Institute

ReFeed

Regen Kilimo

S4S Technologies

Second Bite – The Farmgate Project

Selva Shrimp – Restorative Mangrove Aquaculture

Shamba Calendar

Shel-Life

Strengthening Community Gardens Across America Africa, and the Caribbean

Sustainable Planet – food security & climate mitigation

Terra Oleo

The Restoration Initiative

ThermoSeed

Transfarmation

Vertical and Micro Gardening (VMG)