An interview with Maximilian Lössl and Philipp Wagner, founders of Agrilution, one of Forward Fooding’s top 500 Food Tech startups.

Maximilian Lössl and Philipp Wagner, founders of Agrilution

It’s time to put a face to the name…

We asked our FoodTech 500 top-runners to give us a bit of insight into how they started out as a company and their thoughts on the role of technology in Food innovation. Meet Maximilian and Philipp, the power-duo behind Agrilution, a FoodTech company that designed Plantcube, a fully automated Vertical Farming System for home use to harvest fresh salads and herbs in our own kitchen. Let’s see what the founders had to say.

So tell us a little bit more about you! Where did the idea for your FoodTech company come from?

Philipp: Max Lössl grew up in China. In his world everything is beautiful, healthy and good. On weekends his mother took him to her work as a development aid worker. The maximum contrast. Sad misery resulting from malnutrition, malnourished children who could hardly grow up more differently than he did himself. Max took this strong feeling of injustice with him into adulthood.

After school, back in Germany, he was looking for a way to counteract this injustice. He moved to New Zealand to support Greenpeace. Day in, day out for half a year he talked to people about the huge challenges of our environment and the climate crisis. The urge to make the world a better place continued to grow.

While still in New Zealand, Max read a book on vertical farming by Dr. Dickson Despommier – and it clicked. Max wrote to Dr. Despommier. The author, happy to have an audience in the next generation, recommended that he went to Den Bosch in the Netherlands – the only place to study in this field.

There, he studied the basis for his present concept. He did not stay there for long, because his impulse to act was too strong. Ideas were sprouting in his head. To become big, he had to start small. Why isn’t there vertical farming for homes? Where vegetables, salads and herbs come straight to the table. Grown without pesticides and as close and therefore as fresh as possible to the place of consumption. Packed with nutrients.

He picked up the phone and called his school friend and basketball team mate Philipp – that’s me. We met in the kitchen of Max’s parents and the journey began. Why me? I am a trained mechatronics engineer, studied math and industrial engineering and love not only to visualize things, but more so to make them happen. So after a very short period of time, not only the sketch of a first Plantcube was drawn on paper, but Max and I were sitting together in our parents’ garage and created the first prototype.

How is tech central to your business?

Maximilian and Philipp: Tech is central to our business because we developed both hardware and software for growing plants on controlled environments in-house and our appliances are smart and connected.

Why do you think it’s important to see the food industry embrace tech?

Maximilian and Philipp: The food and AG industry are one of the biggest globally but the last one that has not yet been completely disrupted by tech. It’s important to use tech not for the sake of embracing tech but to make our lives and existing challenges easier.

Want to know more? Check out Agrilution’s full profile here.

Congratulations again to Agrilution for ranking 1st in the “Smart Appliances & Kitchen Management” category of the Foodtech 500 list.

To find out who else made it into the FoodTech 500; the top Food Tech companies in the world, click here.

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