Team Vitameal - Winner of Waseda Hult Prize 2020-2021 Made to Top 6 Tokyo Impact Summit 

Author: Quynh Trang Ho Thi - Hult Prize Waseda Campus Director

Sunday, March 28th, 2021

The challenges that we faced nowadays in the food industry vary from food waste to unhealthy diet. Hult Prize’s mission is to lead a generation to change the world, and tackle these issues using innovative business frameworks. Our 2020-2021 Food for Good Challenge is to transform Food into a Vehicle of Change. On December 13th, Hult Prize Waseda hosted the online final OnCampus event with a diverse body of teams, judges, guest speakers and audiences joining together to learn about the potential solutions to the pressing issues. Being inspired and fascinated, the event announced team Vitameal as the winner of the competition. 

Team Vitameal - 1st Prize Winner @ Waseda Hult Prize OnCampus

With the mission of enabling sustainable consumption with smart data, team Vitameal gave a vivid technical solution to the current set of problems that many individuals were facing everyday in not only Japan, but also many developed and developing countries around the world. The team is led by Samridh Jain, a Agritech VC Analyst, with Riya Mahajan, Shreya Jadhav, and Goureesh Yarlagadda, all who had demonstrated passion for transforming the food industry into a better one. Their goals are to cut food loss significantly, minimizing customer effort with maximum incentive, and improve health benefits as well as achieving a sustainable lifestyle. 

Though still in the early stage of ideation, judges believed that they would continue to develop their business model and made an impact. Indeed, within a short few months between then and the Tokyo Impact Summits where they were competing against 60 teams from all over the world on March 27th, 2021, the team had made great progress on refining their ideas and prototypes. Ultimately, Vitameal was announced as one of the top 6 teams in the Tokyo Impact Summit.

Team Vitameal’s SDGs focus @ Waseda Hult Prize OnCampus

Along with the winner, Waseda Hult Prize onCampus Program also announced the first and second-runner up, which was team Demaeco, on the idea of recyclable food containers, and Rakuda Foods, on the idea of specialized food trucks that offer daily healthy meals to night shift workers at factories. Other participating teams included Yumepatch, Ask to Answer, and The Hood. All teams had shown up with incredibly-well prepared presentations, including detailed market research, proper understanding of business models and even more than so, a collaborative teamwork effort paired with energetic purpose-driven spirits.

Waseda Hult Prize Organizing Committee was extremely honored to be part of this world-changing movement. Along with other universities around Japan and across different countries, it hopes to become the pioneer in developing and bringing out new innovative ideas that have the potential to transform industries and bring technical improvement to our society at large. We look forward to seeing our teams continue their journey of creating great products and services through social entrepreneurship.

To learn more about Hult Prize Waseda, visit our website:  HULT PRIZE ON CAMPUS @ WASEDA UNIVERSITY or follow us on Instagram and Facebook. To learn more about the opportunity to become a Campus Director or participate in Hult Prize movement, visit https://hultprize-oncampus.org/#/application-form