Contests

2021 Hult Prize Challenge on Food For Good (US$1 Million in Seed Capital)

October 5, 2020

3950

Application Deadline: December 2020

The 2021 Hult Prize Challenge will create jobs, stimulate economies, reimagine supply chains and improve outcomes for 10,000,000 people by 2030. Food defines the human experience. Family dinners, religious feasts, quick snacks eaten during breaks at work, and our many other relationships with food combine to shape our bodies, our minds, our communities, and the world we call
home. Food is the ultimate equalizer.

Yet increasingly over recent decades, food systems have become machines of extraction that reduce our well-being, weaken communities, and impoverish the world around us. Once celebrated as pillars of society, community and the economy, today’s grocery stores and kiranas alike paint a dismal picture. Store aisles are filled with arsenals of cheap, addictive products that attack the soul through the hollowness of manufactured consumption. Even street vendors peddle what has become a legalized weapon of mass destruction. Parents wage a daily battle to nourish and nurture their children, while supply chains funnel massive profits to corporations and billionaires.

In 2021, the Hult Prize returns to the roots of the human experience – food. We are challenging you to transform food from a necessity for survival into a vehicle of change and prosperity for humanity. In order to do this, you will have to understand how our existing food systems work, and why they are failing humanity on a global scale. The good news is that you will have many examples from which you can draw inspirations—a veritable army of pioneers who are rethinking food for a better world. Your work will be drawn from these inspirations to build viable companies that will fundamentally change how we all think about food and food systems in the next decade and beyond.

In 2021 the Hult Prize is asking teams around the world to build viable food enterprises that will impact the lives of 10M people in the next decade while strengthening communities, increasing incomes, feeding the hungry and creating jobs.

Before you begin, you need to put aside your prior preconceptions of the failures in our food system. This is not primarily a challenge about global food security for example. This is also not a challenge about the exploitation of agricultural workers. It is not, in any other way, about abstract people “out there” that you’re trying to help. You need to go deeper. This is a challenge about food and the human experience. This challenge is about your own life, your own body, your own family and the possibility of turning a looming crisis into opportunity.

Together, the Hult Prize global community will reclaim the potential and power of the most basic and fundamental resource required to fuel humanity for the century to come.

How to Register

General Application

Participate on the global stage at one of our Regional Summits across the world for the chance to join the Hult Prize Global Accelerator. Didn’t make it? Stay tuned for the Wildcard Round for a second shot.REGISTER

Hult Prize OnCampus

Winning teams from each of the more than +2,000 Hult Prize OnCampus events bypass the general application round to participate in one of our Regional Summits. LEARN MORE