Meat the Winners

Last weekend, Food+Tech Connect, GRACE Communications Foundation and Applegate brought together more than 150 “steakholders,” technologists, entrepreneurs, creatives and policy experts for Hack//Meat, the first-ever “meat hackathon” in New York City. Over the course of 48-hours, participants self-organized into teams and worked with The Design Gym to tackle six of the greatest challenges facing sustainable meat like fragmented communication along the meat supply chain, the impact of consolidation on rural communities and labeling confusion for consumers.

Data scientists, farmers and policy experts traveled in from all over the country to work with New York-based designers, developers and entrepreneurs to break down these challenges and prototype disruptive new solutions.

In the end, 12 teams pitched their hacks to an expert panel of judges including Tom Mylan (The Meat Hook), Stephen McDonnell (Applegate), Paul Matteucci (US Venture Partners), Shai Goldman (500 Startups), Hillary Mason (Bitly), and Christian Pappanicholas (Cannibal/Resto). Winners were awarded $2,500 and marketing services from Purpose and JWT, a paid dinner to Briskettown, and coworking passes to Grind to continue working with “steakeholders” to bring their products to fruition.

A full recap of all the projects from this weekend is available here,  but for now, we’re excited to share the three winners of Hack//Meat with you:

1st Place:

CARV is an internet-enabled scale and label printer that captures and manages data about individual cuts of meat, which can be converted into reports and invoices for anyone in the value chain, including USDA and FSIS (Food Safety Inspection Service). Sales tracking and analytics from Carv help producers to maximize income and overcome the efficiencies of a small farm operation. Critically, CARV doesn’t change processors’ workflow, it is not technically demanding to operate, and it provides value for processors by reducing the time they need to spend reporting to the USDA and FSIS (Food Safety Inspection Service).

“Steakholder”: Vermont Agency of Agriculture
Team: Will Turnage, Challey Comer, Melkorka Kjarval, Ulla Kjarval, Jonathan Yale

2nd Place:

Slot for Slaught is a platform that can be used independently or in conjunction with Carv to streamline communication and manage relationships between meat producers and processors. Producers can search for specific processors by location, schedule a time for slaughtering and submit and track information about their order. Follow-up emails can be automatically generated to help evenly distribute workflow over the course of the year.
“Steakholder”: Vermont Agency of Agriculture
Team: Gabriel Key, Ethan Lo, Chris Clouten, Jacob Duron

3rd Place:

Meat integrates with the Foursquare API to match consumer demand with grocery store supply by allowing consumers to request specific products at a grocer. Users can see what other users are interest in buying and store management can notify people once requested products are stocked. Distributors can see product requests in a map view.
“Steakholder”: Applegate
Team: Lei Zhu

For video footage of the project presentations or media inquires please contact Rachel Finan rachel@prcollaborative.com, 202.339.9598. For more information please visit Hack//Meat, Twitter (hashtag #hackmeat), or Facebook.