FoodShot Global Challenge

About the FoodShot Global Challenge

FoodShot Global launches an annual FoodShot – a MoonShot for Better Food – to create a food system that is healthier, sustainable and equitable. The annual FoodShot identifies a pivotal challenge facing our food system and issues a global call for research to solve that challenge.

Water plays a critical role in our food systems, but it is increasingly becoming scarce for land-based agriculture and damaged for the world’s oceans to produce food. FoodShot Challenge #4: Water, the Essential Input invests in and catalyzes innovations that protect water as an essential limited resource for both aquatic and land-based food production. The challenge’s competitive GroundBreaker Prize, supported by FFAR,  recognizes up to three scientific leaders whose research can catalyze progress toward healthy, sustainable and equitable food systems and provides the recipients guidance, mentorship and resources to maximize the impact and scale of their research. This year’s FoodShot Challenge, the fourth, will invest over $500,000 in three rising star entrepreneurs, researchers or advocates whose research catalyzes innovation that protects water as an essential limited resource for both aquatic and land-based food and agriculture.  

FoodShot Challenge #4: Water, the Essential Input will fund research that has the potential for scale and impact and considers how water cycles interact with the three previous FoodShots, related to soil health, precision protein and bioactive foods. FoodShot Challenge #4 seeks solutions to address:  

• Mitigating and adapting to the multiple threats of climate change on the water cycle as related to food production  
• Overuse and contamination of water that impacts food production, ecosystems, biodiversity and human health  
• Disruptions to water cycles connecting land- and water-based systems  
• Unsustainable aquatic food production (overfishing or damaging water-based farming)  
• Equitable access to aquatic foods and wealth creation for indigenous and low-income coastal communities that are especially affected by climate change  

Applications are due December 1, 2023. For more information and to apply, visit www.foodshot.org.