Tuesday February 5, 2019
The Brightlands Business Club held its first event at Brightlands Greenport Venlo, and Brightlands Greenport Venlo was ready for us! After a short impression about the “Food Campus” we were back at university, with dazzling presentations by two professors: Theo de Kok and Koen Venema. The first spoke about the relation between genome and response to (healthy) food. The latter demonstrated the gastro-intestine simulator, or The Incredible Machine (TIM), where digestion of food can be investigated in astonishing detail. The messages were clear: people show very different behaviour to (healthy or other) food, so you need to know about their genome first, which opens the door for personalized nutrition. And there is so much more to learn about what food can do for us, for our health, and for our life span. The recently finished “Cooker” of MiFood was living proof that at Venlo entrepreneurs put these theories into practice (and business).
To finish it of we visited Scelta, a family owned company near Venlo where everything is about mushrooms, and innovations in healthy food & feed. Jan Klerken explained at length just how much potential there is for the worlds nutrition in the humble champignon mushroom. And to show this is not just theory, we got a 3-course dinner, including new innovative products like the Vitamin D3 mushroom, prepared by their chef himself.
