An interview with Solveiga Pakštaitė, the founder of Mimica, one of Forward Fooding’s top 500 Food Tech startups.

It’s time to put a face to the name…

We asked our FoodTech500 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 Solveiga, the mastermind behind Mimica, a company that develops a biologically accurate smart packaging solution that reduces food waste and improves food safety. Let’s see what she had to say.

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

Solveiga: I’ve always loved the idea of inclusive design – it’s when you make something easy enough for somebody with a specific disability to use, it makes it even easier for people without that disability to use it, and therefore making the whole design smarter, without excluding people. That’s the approach I took to creating Mimica Touch and the inspiration hit when I was working at a design consultancy in London, on a project about visually impaired people and public transportation. Blind people perform many everyday tasks in cool, different ways to sighted people, but chatting to our participants made me realize that food is also an issue – specifically printed expiry dates.

I started a project to solve this and quickly realized that we’re all ‘blind’ to when our food really goes off, not just people who can’t see, and that’s why we waste so much. I collaborated with a chemist to create the first versions of Mimica Touch, which I filed a patent for. I never thought I’d start a company, but it was market pull that made it an exciting opportunity. I won the UK James Dyson Award for the concept and the giants of the food industry started contacting me.

How is tech central to your business?

Solveiga: To us, user behaviour is central to our business and technology allows us to give people much better information with which to make much better decisions about their food. We’re providing a tool that empowers our natural tenancy to do the right thing and not waste.

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

Solveiga: Some technologies have exciting potential to solve some real problems in our complex food systems and it would just be silly to ignore these.

Want to know more? See Mimica’s full profile here.

Congratulations again to Mimica for ranking sixth in the category “Food Safety & Traceability” 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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