New ideas for the agro-food industry

Yesterday we began our trip across the food novelties we found in Rotterdam, with the story of Koppert Cress and Dutch Cuisine (read here). Yet the Dutch city has much more to offer: after all, it defines itself as “The agro-food delta of Europe”. The industry here is huge and the port – the largest on the continent, with 1.8 million cube metres of air-conditioned warehouses and over 750 thousand refrigerated ones – is bustling with fruit, vegetables, juices, soy, corn, food oil, wheat, seeds.

Food multinationals here flourish, yet there’s also attention to small producers. The new iconic Market Hall represents the meeting of these two realities. This beautiful site opened in 2014. It hosts around one hundred producers, 15 food stores and 8 restaurants. Micro-businesses have the main role in the KunsthalCooks & Cultivates Festival, a sort of Salone del Gusto taking place every two years. It focuses on new trends in healthy and sustainable food. Innovation in the food industry is indeed a challenge the city experiences daily, through many projects.

Rotterzwam, for instance, is an innovative project by Siemen Cox, an ex finance manager who fell in love with nutrition and sustainability. He has thus created an ingenious way of producing mushrooms (“zwam” in Dutch): every year the Netherlands produce 6 million kilos of coffee wastes, only 0.2% is drunk. He recuperates some of these bags of used coffee and stores them in rooms at a controlled temperature of around 18°C: they’re the ideal soil to cultivate Pleurotus ostreatus mushrooms. These are among the most commonly found around the world. They’re commonly known as oyster mushrooms: «Today we can produce around 200 kilos of mushrooms every month. Let’s consider that our production is slower than in a traditional farm. It takes them one week to produce 10-15 tons of mushrooms. It takes me one year». Yet Cox only needs wastes, nothing else. The mushrooms’ taste is pure, it is not influenced by the aroma of coffee. And this process can be repeated infinite times, as the production site is full of spores. A curious fact: «We even tried with Starbucks wastes, but to no avail. Their toasting is not well balanced». He sells to restaurants and supermarkets and exports all over the world: Europe, Australia, Chile, the United States. He’s even put on the market a kit to produce them at home, but he warns: «Don’t try to use your coffee machine dregs, you could get monsters».

Floating Farms is the answer of estate development company Beladon to the constant growth of the world population, which increases by 200 thousand new inhabitants every day. «The constant urbanisation creates huge logistics and waste issues – says Peter van Wingerden, general manager at Beladon – We have less and less space to produce oxygen and food. On the other hand, the greenhouse effect is raising the level of the oceans, reducing the surface above the sea level even further. Moreover, water is drawn from the reserves, but this makes the land sink». In order to respond to this growing lack of available soil, you can use what van Wingerden calls “an ocean of possibilities”: that is to say the sea, by “populating” it with floating farms with an integrated, multi level system, anchored on the waves. They can be used to cultivate vegetables (on top) and farm fish (below).

Maidie van den Bos and Sanne Zwart’s Flowers & Sours is a food lab that finely represents the main culinary trends in Rotterdam which also promise to characterise our future. It’s a sort of cooperative of small food producers: raw milk, edible flowers used to make ice creams, herb teas or cocktails, a thousand different fermentations… «We basically use bacteria». “Milk sommelier” Bas de Groot also works with them. He has a profession we couldn’t find in Italy: there are 17 million cows in The Netherlands. «Why a “milk sommelier”? Because milk has endless shades of taste – he says – It depends on the type of cow, its diet, the soil where the grass the cow ate grew».
(2, the end. We’ve also written about pizza in Rotterdam, thanks to Tania Mauri: read the Identità di Pizza newsletter)