The Faculty of Food Technologies of Sumy National Agrarian University has assembled a powerful team that, thanks to a startup, has successfully passed two programs in the field of “Innovative Food Technologies. Creation of meat substitutes”: Science & Business Acceleration Program and AgriFood Innovation Camp.
Researchers at Sumy NAU are constantly working on startups and participating in various research projects. This time, the team of the Department of Food Technology under the leadership of Dmytro Bidiuk, PhD, consisting of Oksana Melnyk, PhD, Serhii Bokovets, PhD, Olha Sereda, PhD, and Yaroslav Dziuba, Master Degree, developed the startup PLANTARA MEAT, which was selected for two acceleration programs.
The Science & Business Acceleration Program 2025 was created in cooperation with the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Startup Fund. Finalists will be able to get $25,000 in AWS cloud services. The program will last for 6 months, from June 2 to November 14, 2025, and aims to develop knowledge-intensive innovations with commercialization potential.
The second, but no less important program is the AgriFood Innovation Camp, created for startups and businesses with agri-food solutions and implemented by the Radar Tech accelerator, the international consulting company Civitta, with the support of the European Institute of Food Innovation and Technology (EIT Food). The program will run from June 5 to October 22, 2025.
Both programs provide participants with strategic mentoring from domestic and foreign experts, practical tasks and assistance in forming a business model and bringing it to market, fundraising, and pitch preparation. Finally, participants are guaranteed the opportunity to take part in Demo Day, where teams will be able to present their startups to potential partners and investors.
The team of the Department of Food Technology of Sumy NAU will work on the development of a natural vegetable meat substitute based on products of complex processing of amaranth. The process will be supported by the “Producers of Amaranth and Amaranth Products,” headed by Oleksandr Duda, and a number of food companies interested in implementing the technology of using meat substitute in their own production and sales through existing trade channels.
We are proud of the diligence of our researchers and wish them success in implementing the project, as it is another way to improve the environmental situation and an opportunity to find reliable, socially responsible partners who are also interested in expanding their own product range using plant-based meat substitutes.
