As established players have known for years, food and beverage is a multi-trillion-dollar industry with relatively minor variations in water quality and regulatory requirements. Moving forward, major societal drivers are pressing both industry and agriculture toward novel water solutions.
To control water risk, the food industry is expanding its focus beyond processing plants to water savings across the value chain. With deeper pockets and a better market-oriented grasp of costs than municipal water, this industry is rich with opportunity for technologies that can reduce water needs, promote reuse, and efficiently pretreat wastewater for discharge. The industry will be forced as never before to listen both to downstream retailers concerned about sustainability and upstream agriculture that makes up much of their water risk.
The range of applicable technologies is as diverse as the opportunity is large, demanding an analytical framework – the Lux Innovation Grid – for understanding all the emerging innovative entities in the space. Focused solutions are rife, from crop like AquaSpy and UgMO that use moisture sensors and crop knowledge to monitor field conditions and Capilix’s capillary electrophoresis sensor technology for monitoring hydroponics systems, to production plant where the likes of Bilexys and Emefcy look to apply their variants on microbial fuel cells to generate chemicals or energy from process wastewater.
The overall takeaway is clear. With increasing trepidation about population growth in the face of climate change, and increasing world affluence driving more water-intensive foods, industry demand for novel solutions from farm to factory have just begun to accelerate.
Source: Lux Research report “Farm to Factory: Technology in Reducing Water Risk in the Food and Beverage Industry” — client registration required.
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