South Korea: Next year will be the first year of food tech ecosystem creation

Lee Ki-won, professor of food technology at Seoul National University. With the recent pandemic situation caused by COVID-19 and the acceleration of DX (Digital Transformation), ‘consumer tech’, a technology closely related to life, has rapidly emerged, leading to great changes in the food market. ‘Food Tech’, which was selected as one of the top 5 technology trends at CES in 2022, is an emerging technology that solves problems related to eating from a consumer or individual point of view. Emergence means making the impossible possible by challenging what others have not done, and it can be said that the world is already in the age of emergence. The field where the emergent ecosystem is most active is the food tech field. This is to replace existing food-related industries such as food consumption, distribution, production, agriculture and fisheries, healthcare, and tourism by using emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality, blockchain, robotics, ...