Auchan launches award in Portugal to support innovative companies

The Food Innovation Prize aims to give the stage to projects that stand out for their differentiating characteristics in the market.

Auchan Retail Portugal has just launched the first edition of the Food Innovation Award, an initiative that aims to reward and promote companies that work with products, services and packaging, in an innovative way, in the agri-food sector. At Applications are now open and run until March 17.

With this challenge, Auchan offers companies the opportunity to present their innovation projects, also promoting their commercialization.

To participate, companies must complete the form in one of the three existing categories – Product Innovation Award; Service Innovation Award; and Packaging Innovation Award.

The evaluation of the projects will have as selection criteria the innovation and originality, the relevance and foundation, the nutritional and organoleptic properties, and the sustainability.

The prize for the winning companies – one per category – is the sale of the product or service in Auchan stores, and at auchan.pt, presence on the ‘Future Taste’ innovation stage, support in external communication in order to increase awareness and visibility of the product or service and integration into the Netmentora Monitoring Program, with individual monitoring and collective monitoring sessions.

With the launch of this award, Auchan reinforces its position as a food specialist, while continuing to democratize access to food innovation.

The objective is to give these companies/products a stage, but also to provide an increasingly diversified offer with innovative and exclusive items to its consumers and customers, who are increasingly betting on the food of the future.

Awards aimed at SMEs

The projects in the competition must have been developed during the year 2022 or already be at a sufficiently advanced stage to allow the evaluation of the jury in March 2023.

The prizes are aimed at small, medium and large companies, groups of companies or newly created companies, as long as they are part of the agricultural sector or the agri-food industry.

Remember that Auchan launched, in 2021, the Future Taste, a space that showcases new food trends and innovative products on a monthly basis. Since then, products such as salmon and vegetable bacon, fruit-based meat, cricket snacks, tempeh bars, vegetable butter, among others, have passed through this space.