Winners of the V-Label international innovation competition announced!

As a member of the jury in the sustainability category, I had to choose the best 15 products from the entries pre-selected by an algorithm. With a couple of exceptions, the shortlisted products were food, and they offered a very good cross section of the strategic thinking about sustainability that the food industry can apply: from ingredient and packaging material selection and sourcing, circular production processes, and resource saving to value-added reuse, social impact maximising, and stakeholder engagement.

Analysing the sustainability category from a “Hungarian” point of view, unfortunately I must say that I wasn’t surprised not to find any products made by Hungarian manufacturers. At the same time, I was really surprised to see that the Central European region was very well represented in the category. In the light of this, I think the lesson we can learn from the competition is that food manufacturers and investors in neighbouring countries do see potential in sustainability and vegan foods. //