Max Leveau (Founding Partner & COO, Forward Fooding)
The world’s largest gathering of futurists came to Dubai this year, confronting big questions about AI, space exploration, and human progress. But one fundamental challenge also took center stage: how will we feed humanity’s future?
At the Dubai Future Forum 2025, held at the iconic Museum of the Future, Forward Fooding curated a session with Emirates Flight Catering to answer that question not with speculation, but by experiencing it with the taste buds.
A Forum Imagining Tomorrow
Left to right: Suresh Vaidhyanathan (Forward Fooding Senior Advisor – Middle East & India), Federico Duarte (CEO, NXW), Max Leveau (Founding Partner & COO, Forward Fooding), Kathleen Alexander (Co-founder & CEO, Savor), and Tan Ding Jie (Co-founder & CTO, Prefer)
The Dubai Future Forum 2025 brought together over 2,500 participants, 200+ global speakers, and 100+ leading foresight institutions for a week-long exploration of humanity’s most pressing challenges. His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Defense, and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Dubai Future Foundation, emphasized that “Dubai partners with all who share values of optimism, proactivity, and readiness from around the world, to imagine, design and execute the future that people aspire to.”
But nestled among these conversations was a more intimate, sensory experience that brought the future directly to attendees’ palates.
Future Sampling: Beyond Traditional Food Systems
Among the forum’s innovative activations was “Future Sampling: A Culinary Journey Through Tomorrow’s Food Systems,” an immersive experience that transformed abstract innovation into a tangible, delicious reality hosted by the Dubai Future Foundation in partnership with Emirates Flight Catering. This is where Forward Fooding’s expertise in agri-foodtech came to life.
Chocolate bonbons made with Savor butter in the chocolate ganache
The tasting session wasn’t about novelty, but an experiential immersion on addressing a stark reality presented at the forum, where current food systems impose $15 trillion annually in hidden health and environmental costs. The innovations showcased represented practical pathways toward solving this crisis.
What Tomorrow Tastes Like
Left to right: Federico Duarte (CEO, NXW), Kathleen Alexander (Co-founder & CEO, Savor), Tan Ding Jie (Co-founder & CTO, Prefer), and Mai Dallal (Marketing Executive, Bustanica)
What made this activation particularly powerful was its direct, sensory nature. The Future Tasting Session grounded innovation in immediate experience. Forward Fooding curated a selection of groundbreaking food innovations that challenged conventional assumptions about where our food comes from.
During the Future Tasting Session, our Founding Partner and COO, Max Leveau, presented a brief overview of how the FoodTech sector is currently evolving into “FoodTech Wave 3.0,” a new paradigm that moves toward a more circular and systemic approach to innovation. This shift is characterized by a rise in technologies focused on upcycling, sustainable packaging, precision fermentation, and personalized nutrition, which is reflected in investment trends showing a decrease in funding share for delivery services and a rise in AgTech and food processing.
For the GCC region, this wave offers a strategic opportunity to tackle critical challenges such as water scarcity, high import dependence, and food waste by adopting specific solutions like optimized Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA), Ag Biotech for soil fertility and water retention, and sustainable aquaculture.
Attendees didn’t just hear about the future of food. Instead, they tasted it, questioned it, and connected directly with the food innovators and founders themselves:
Savor‘s Animal- and Plant-Free Butter and Chocolate Bonbons
Kathleen Alexander (Co-founder & CEO, Savor)
Moving beyond agricultural constraints entirely, Savor utilizes a thermochemical process rather than traditional farming or biological fermentation. By harvesting carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, they apply heat to oxidize these elements into fatty acids. These are then formulated into fats that are chemically identical to animal fats, delivering the authentic flavor and melting properties of dairy butter with a significantly lower carbon footprint.
Savor butter using thermochemistry
Prefer‘s Beanless Iced Oat Latte
Tan Ding Jie (Co-founder & CTO, Prefer)
Coffee without coffee beans? This innovation uses fermentation technology to create authentic coffee flavor and experience while addressing the vulnerabilities of traditional coffee cultivation facing climate pressures. They utilize upcycled food surplus—specifically day-old bread, soy pulp, and spent barley grains—as their primary inputs. Through a proprietary fermentation process, these by-products are transformed to replicate the complex aromatic profile of coffee, creating a “beanless” brew that is sustainable, caffeine-tunable, and resilient to climate change.
Nutrition from Water (NXW)’s Biomass-Fermented Peach Flavoured Alt-Yogurt and Chocolate & Nuts Protein Bar
Federico Duarte (CEO, NXW)
Demonstrating the potential of the blue economy, NXW creates nutrition by tapping into marine microorganisms sourced from pristine waters. Through biomass fermentation, they cultivate these microorganisms to produce “marine whey”—a protein-rich, neutral-tasting ingredient. This process converts simple marine inputs into high-value nutrition, offering a bio-identical alternative to dairy proteins without the need for cows or land-intensive agriculture.
Bustanica‘s Soil-Less Cultivated Greens
Mai Dallal (Marketing Executive, Bustanica) and Mohamed Al Awadhi (Senior Procurement Manager at Emirates Flight Catering)
Operating as the world’s largest indoor vertical farm, Bustanica utilizes advanced machine learning and AI to produce over 1 million kilograms of pesticide-free leafy greens annually while consuming 95% less water than conventional agriculture. This local UAE innovation showcases vertical farming’s potential to produce fresh, nutritious greens in one of the world’s most challenging climates. The facility’s relationship with Emirates Flight Catering (EKFC) reached a major milestone in February 2024, when EKFC fully acquired the entity (formerly a joint venture known as Emirates Crop One). This strategic investment established Bustanica as a fully UAE-owned company, enabling EKFC to secure a consistent, sustainable supply chain for its airline and retail partners while directly reinforcing the UAE’s National Food Security Strategy.
Each innovation represented a different approach to the same fundamental challenge: producing nutritious, delicious food while dramatically reducing environmental impact.
Why Food Innovation Matters Now
The timing couldn’t be more critical. Nearly 2 billion people still lack access to clean drinking water, and climate change continues to threaten traditional agriculture. Meanwhile, global populations are growing, and dietary preferences are shifting.
Dr. Trevor Martin, Co-founder and CEO of Mammoth Biosciences, spoke about the revolutionary potential of biotechnology: “We are at an exciting moment in gene editing … offering a one-time cure that will reshape the healthcare system as we know it. It’s revolutionary, and I truly believe that within the next ten years we could treat all genetic diseases in existence today.” This same biotechnology revolution is transforming food production.
Roman Axelrod, Founder of XPANCEO, noted that “wearable devices are the natural environment for AI and algorithms to live within us”—a reminder that innovation is becoming increasingly integrated into our daily lives, including how we understand and interact with food.
The innovations presented by Savor, Prefer, Nutrition from Water (NXW), and Emirates Bustanica at Forward Fooding’s tasting session offer glimpses of solutions: precision fermentation that doesn’t depend on arable land or favorable weather, vertical farming that brings fresh produce to desert environments, and biotechnology that creates abundance from minimal inputs.
A Future Worth Tasting
As Professor Lesley Lokko OBE, Founder and Chair of the African Futures Institute (AFI), observed: “People think of the future as a destination – for me the future is a process, it’s a part of that journey of becoming … that we’re all engaged in.”
Forward Fooding’s contribution to Dubai Future Forum 2025, in partnership with Emirates Flight Catering and featuring innovations from Savor, Prefer, Nutrition from Water (NXW), and Bustanica, embodied this philosophy—transforming abstract futures into present experiences, making the coming transformation of our food system tangible, relatable, and ultimately, delicious.
“AgriFoodTech innovation is strategic to the GCC’s food security agenda—and ultimately the Global South’s. There’s no better place than the Museum of the Future to showcase these entrepreneurs’ work. We need to raise awareness about technology’s potential—especially biotechnology—in transforming our food systems. When we talk about the future, food must be at the center of that conversation.”
Max Leveau – Founding Partner & COO @ Forward Fooding
The Dubai Future Forum raised profound questions about AI, progress, and humanity’s relationship with technology and nature. Forward Fooding’s Future Tasting Session at the Museum of the Future provided one of the most satisfying answers: when innovation is guided by purpose, sustainability, and genuine improvement to human life, the future doesn’t just look promising—it tastes extraordinary.
Forward Fooding continues to connect food system innovators with partners, investors, and platforms worldwide, accelerating the transition to more sustainable, resilient food systems. The innovations showcased at Dubai Future Forum 2025 represent just a fraction of the transformative technologies reshaping how humanity will feed itself in the decades ahead.
