Seeding The Future Global Food System Challenge- Growth Grants

The Seeding The Future Global Food System Challenge, hosted by Welthungerhilfe and funded by the Seeding The Future Foundation, aims to support transformative innovations in food systems, especially in the Global South. This initiative invites multidisciplinary teams to submit impactful projects that enhance food safety, sustainability, and equitable access. With grants totaling up to $1 million annually, the Challenge offers financial support to promising ideas that demonstrate economic feasibility and high impact potential across multiple domains.

Hosted by Welthungerhilfe (WHH) and funded by the Seeding The Future Foundation (STF), the Challenge is intended to recognize and support breakthrough innovations that can spark transformations of our food systems, with a particular focus on addressing critical challenges in the Global South.
The Challenge aims to inspire impactful and transforming innovations that reside at the INNOVATION FOCUS AREA in which three domains intersect:
Innovations leading to safe and nutritious food for a healthy diet Innovations leading to sustainable or regenerative practices that enable food systems to stay within planetary boundaries, including food waste and food loss reduction Innovations leading to equitable access to food that is affordable, appealing and trusted
About the Global Food System Challenge
Providing a growing global population with access to affordable, safe, and nutritious food for a healthy diet while maintaining the health of our planet will require a transformation of our food systems. Advances and discoveries in science and technology, creative new approaches, and collaborations across cultures and multiple disciplines, will lead to forward-thinking innovations with the potential for significant food system changes.
The goal of the Seeding The Future Global Food System Challenge is to inspire and support innovative, diverse, and multidisciplinary teams to create game-changing innovations that will help transform our food systems.
Award Levels
The Seeding The Future Global Food System Challenge will provide monetary awards in the form of grants and prizes totaling up to one million US dollars annually. The Challenge will provide three levels of awards to incentivize transformative food system innovations at different stages of their development. Applications can only be submitted at one award level.
Growth Grants ($100,000 each) will be awarded to organizations that have demonstrated that their innovation is doable and have projected both economic feasibility at scale and high-impact potential to transform the food system. The innovation must benefit at least two, ideally three domains with no negative impact on the others.Seeding The Future Grand PrizesSeed Grants

Eligibility

Welthungerhilfe and the Seeding The Future Foundation are calling on all scientists, engineers, innovators, entrepreneurs, and multidisciplinary teams from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), non-profits, social enterprises, universities, research institutions and small/emerging for-profit enterprise to submit game-changing innovations that will help transform food systems.Non-profits or non-governmental organizations located in any countryAcademic or research institutions located in any countryEarly-stage or emerging for-profit companies or social enterprises located in any country*Excluded are countries or territories against which the U.S. and/or Germany maintains comprehensive sanctions (currently, Afghanistan, Belarus, Crimea, Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Russia, Sevastopol, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, the Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk, & Zaporizhzhia Regions of Ukraine, and Venezuela).Teams of students or researchers may participate as part of an organization’s submission.Organizations are encouraged to form teams to compete in the Challenge.If two or more organizations form a team to compete, they should choose one of the organizations to serve as the applicant.Please see Global Food System Challenge FAQ for additional informations.

Ineligibility

Individuals are not eligible to apply.What will not be funded:Projects that have a negative effect on either the safety or healthfulness of food, the sustainability of the food supply chain, or that are unlikely to be accepted by the end-user or consumer Initiatives for which funds will be used to support large for-profit entities in their commercial activities such as R&D, innovation, manufacturing or sales/marketing Initiatives which are not scalable beyond the initial project scope and have limited projected impact over time For-profit entities with significant financial assets or which passed Series A financing round Theoretical concepts or ideas without any experiments or a reduction to practice Projects associated with political campaigns, capital campaigns, or lobbying Individual people with no existing organizational entity