Chiara Cecchini
EXCLUSIVE
Food Systems Expert; Forbes 30 Under 30; Design Thinking Leader & Innovator
Chiara Cecchini leads Business Development at Savor, a stealth company pursuing transformational technology to create climate negative food ingredients.
Formerly CEO of Future Food Americas, over the past several years she has been working with major food and beverage companies to design and execute innovation strategies to create a positive impact on both human and planetary health.
Chiara is a Partner at the Future Food Institute and a Board Member at the Food for Climate Leagues, two NGOs working to democratize sustainable food practices across the industry, consumers and institutions, and to leverage education and behavior change strategies.
Formerly, Chiara was a researcher at the Food, Science and Technology Department at UC Davis, working on creating a semantic platform to empower the Internet of Food.
Chiara was a researcher at the Barilla Foundation, where she co-wrote “Food and Cities,” a paper analyzing the role of cities in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Chiara lectures about sustainable business and innovation at San Francisco State University, a 30,000-student university, well known for its diversity and accessibility.
Additionally, she is part of the Expert Network at the World Economic Forum. Chiara writes about food for major publications, and was recognized on the "Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe" list for Social Entrepreneurship in 2020.
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Investing in Food: The Best Answer for Climate Change
Agriculture caused atmospheric carbon dioxide to rise from 260 ppm (parts per million) some 7,000 years ago to 280 ppm by the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. A rise of 0.003 ppm per year.
CO2 levels reached 310 ppm by the outbreak of the Second World War: a rise of 0.3 ppm per year, 100 times faster than in the previous 5,000 years.
In 2020, its level rose to over 412 ppm. A rise of 1.3 ppm per year, four times faster than in the previous 100 years and 400 times faster than in the last 5,000 years. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are now higher than they have ever been in the last three million years.
But what does all of this have to do with food?
Much more than we think.
The food, agriculture, and land-use sector contributes 24% of the rising anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
75% of the world’s food is generated from only 12 plants and 5 animal species, which are depleting the soil.
These are both drivers of climate change.
Although we produce enough food to feed 11 billion people, there are only 7.8 billion people in the world today, and yet 825 million of us go to bed hungry.
In this fascinating presentation, Chiara helps audiences to connect the dots by citing years of research as she explains how these complex problems need a set of solutions designed to work together.
She addresses waste and diets, shifting agricultural practices and how to bring them to scale, and decoupling food production from land, and why these are just a few of the possibilities worth analyzing.
Everyone is talking about it, but what does "innovation" actually mean? And how do we accomplish it?
In this customizable talk, Chiara walks audiences through the "Design Thinking" methodology and demonstrates how to define a real problem and the design principles which are at the core of any winning solution.
First Steps for Innovation: The Power of Design Thinking
Food without Agriculture: Is it a Possible Future? And is it the Future We Want?
For the environmentally minded carnivore, meat poses a culinary conundrum. Producing it requires a great deal of land and water resources, and ruminants such as cows and sheep are responsible for half of all greenhouse gas emissions associated with agriculture.
When looking at solutions, scalability remains a central question: How do we feed 10 billion people with nutritious food that doesn't exploit the planet, is affordable for everyone, and is based on a resilient supply chain?
Join Chiara as she explains in-depth why decoupling food production from agriculture is an answer worth exploring.
Examples are cultivated animal ingredients, produced by cultivating animal cells and bypassing farming; ingredients made from precision fermentation — using bioreactors and microflora as miniature factories to make proteins, fats, and carbohydrates without cows; and ingredients made from carbon dioxide and renewable energy to combine carbon capturing with macronutrients creation.