From June 15-19, 2020, Bühler will host Bühler GO!2020. This virtual networking and engagement event supports Bühler’s efforts to build and strengthen an industry-wide collaborative network of food industry leaders, addressing global nutritional challenges such as sustainability, food security, and feeding 10 billion people by 2050. Discussing and exploring latest food trends, such as alternative proteins and ancient grains with US and worldwide customers, will help ensure that companies have the agility and innovation power to effectively deal with the challenges put before them. To support that, Bühler will open its brand-new Food Application Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on June 19.

“Bühler GO!2020 is about learning together how the food industry can meet these global challenges with good sustainable businesses that create real impact,” says Andy Sharpe, CEO Bühler North America.

Together with its customers and partners, Bühler is supporting the evolution to a sustainable food industry. The event will further strengthen Bühler’s collaborative approach to today’s challenges for the food industry, by bringing together more than 500 leaders of food companies, academia, industry associations, government organizations, and start-ups. Culminating in the opening of the Food Application Center in Minneapolis on June 19, the Bühler GO!2020 event will focus on framing the global challenges, creating safe and transparent food chains, sustainable protein supplies for 10 billion people, workforce development, and leadership. “This new Food Application Center will be an important resource for the North American food industry as we focus on the future of food, reintroducing ancient grains, peas, and lentils into our diets, and innovating around plant-based proteins; all of this addressing the demands of consumers as diets are changing fast,” says Stefan Scheiber, CEO at Bühler Group. “Many of the global challenges we faced before the coronavirus have only been intensified. Our collective situation has held a magnifying glass to these challenges. It has shown us where we can improve our food supply chain, and our ability to safely and sustainably nourish our population.” To rise to these challenges, Scheiber expects great solutions to be developed with Bühler’s customers, “as it is here that we can marry the highly entrepreneurial American spirit with the best of our Swiss heritage as a high quality solution provider for world-class products. This event allows us to stay in close contact and enables companies to learn best practice from one another.”

The Food Application Center (FAC) will be the new Bühler stronghold in developing economically viable and sustainable food solutions in North America. The future solutions developed there will help feed a growing population of nearly 10 billion people in 2050.

“Innovation remains the lifeblood for sustainable market success, particularly in the food industry,” says Yannick Gaechter, Director of the new FAC. “New food opportunities are multifaceted and need to be addressed with partners across the whole food value chain. This is where the new FAC comes in,” Gaechter adds. “With the FAC, Bühler is helping to create an innovation ecosystem by providing predominantly North American food companies, start-ups, and academic partners with a platform and the capabilities for creating new products and processes that will help address – from farm to fork, and from bean to burger – not only the current consumer trends, but also our global nutrition challenges in a sustainable way.”

Drawing on 160 years of food processing expertise, the new FAC was created as a platform for developing new ways to transform peas, beans, corn, pulses, oats, ancient grains, and many other crops into new food solutions such as flours, snacks, pasta, cereals, and a myriad of extruded products, including plant-based meat analogues.