Start-Up Grøntlab

A sustainable initiative with the aim to inspire people to experiment with local and seasonal fruits and vegetables, while preventing food waste and post-harvest losses.

Scope - The Food Industry

For a long time, the food industry used to be a local activity. This changed drastically in the previous century with crucial developments leading us into a new system of mass producing in monoculture agricultures and transporting food all over the world. In this project, we have focussed on human practices within this food system. We realised that the consumer got used to a culture of availability. It is normal to buy bananas from Colombia and sweet potatoes from China, all year round.

Co-Designing an interactive game for friend groups

We used a participatory design process, using street interventions, co-creation workshops and numerous test rounds. Using the metaphor of ‘grandma’s cooking skills’, we want to encourage people to go back into a more intuitive way of cooking. One where you are less stuck on a specific recipe with a specific grocery list, and more experimentative and flexible to what is in season. This lead to the concept of an interactive game for friend groups.

“I never bought a whole cabbage before, because I just did not know what to do with it”

(Saurabh, co-creation)

“By calling it an experiment, I feel less afraid of doing something wrong”

(Karla, after our workshop)

Download an overview of the gamecards here! The design was made to be used with any kind of fruits and vegetables that would normally be wasted, especially focussing on post-harvest losses early in the food cycle. With this project we were qualified for the ‘DISIE days of impact’ finals, which gave us the honour of pitching in the Danish parliament. For the project, we also wrote a 78-pages reflection in the form of an academic report titled ‘a case study of Grontlab: an entrepreneurial journey accepting unpredictabilities’.

I couldn't have done this without:
- My co-founders & good friends: Caro & Tekla
- The Aalborg university incubator programme
- DISIE: The Danish Institute of Sustainable Innovation, specifically The Days of Impact