Start-up Weekend Galway eyeing up the food tech industry


30 Mar 2016

The upcoming start-up festival in Galway is focusing on food tech, in particular, with the April event set to cook up a storm.

We’ve had start-up weekends in Cork and Dublin in recent months, and now Galway will play host to three days of talks and networking, with food tech the priority.

Food tech is probably one of the less advanced areas within tech – in comparison to things like gaming, fintech etc – so the projects on show are sure to be of interest to quite a few. Things like forks that send electric shocks to your tongue to replace salt in your diet, for example.

The Irish government quite recently published a report on the potential behind agri-food innovation, citing it as one of the key drivers behind thousands of jobs in the near future.

Some regions are already on the road in terms of playing to their strengths in agri-food, such as the Boyne Valley Food Hub in Meath, which has the ambition of becoming the Silicon Valley of food production.

Pedigree

Powered by BOIstartups, Techstars is the broad umbrella under which the Start-up Weekend series operates, with Dublin’s event last July seeing Book-e, a start-up focused on the burgeoning e-sports betting market, receiving plenty of plaudits.

Not long after Cork hosted its own variant, with the upcoming leg taking place in Superpixel Labs on 8-10 April. The overall Techstars community now has more than 193,000 members, running thousands of events around the world.

Main dining image via Shutterstock