Carnegie Mellon Qatar students win top foodtech idea for printing vegetables

Carnegie Mellon Qatar students win top foodtech idea for printing vegetables

Two students at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q), a Qatar Foundation partner university, won top prize in the FoodTech category at a Qatar Development Bank competition. Mohammad Fadhel Annan and Lujain Al Mansoori created an idea for 3D printed vegetables, an alternative to farming that could bolster food security in places like Qatar where there is very little arable land.

The competition was the Business Incubation and Acceleration Hackathon, hosted by Qatar Development Bank. As the winners of the FoodTech category, Annan and Al Mansoori won 25,000 QAR to invest into their idea.

QDB’s Business Incubation and Acceleration Hackathon was designed to empower entrepreneurs in Qatar to share their ideas and creative solutions to address challenges in digital transformation across a variety of industries.

The 2023 edition spanned the Fintech, SportsTech and FashionTech industries, and featured solutions on Enabling Customers Experiences and Operational Solutions for Digital Transformation in a number of sectors such as food tech where a CMU-Q applicant was awarded the first prize.

Michael Trick, dean of CMU-Q, was impressed by the ingenuity of Annan and Al Mansoori’s idea: “We encourage our students at CMU-Q to apply the knowledge they learn here to create solutions that will have a big impact.