Montpellier: Food Pilot, the start-up quantifies the sustainable development of the agri-food industry

L'application Food Pilot. DR – DR

L'équipe Food Pilot (Didier Livio, deuxième à d.) CAPA Pictures/DR – CAPA Pictures/DR

The Montpellier-based start-up Food Pilot collects data from agri-food professionals to analyze their sustainable development progress. She will be present at the next Agricultural Show.

It will be one of the most scrutinized regional participants of the next Agricultural Show. Food Pilot, which recently announced a fundraising of 4.5 million euros, helps players in the agri-food industry (sectors, manufacturers, farmers…) to qualify their data to measure their ecological change efforts. . A professional application that will feed the experimental "Eco Score" label, which analyzes the environmental impact of food.

Quantifying the environmental progress of professionals

"Our application aims to use data from the agri-food industry to reduce its technological footprint, presents Didier Livio, the founder, with 40 years of experience in the sustainable development sector. One of the strong points of this is not to be based on declarative information given by the professional, as most players in the sector do, but on data from his production that we collect in his software."

Concretely, the start-up bases its data on the chosen elements, outgoing to the professional it is studying. For example, it collects its elements by connecting to the actor's accounting software, to check the possible purchase of pesticides that the actor has made. "These data allow us to definitively qualify the progress that the professional has made on the ecological change that the sector is planning."

"If a farmer changes a variety of corn that consumes more water but is more resistant, we will see this in his purchases. The manufacturer who makes the biscuits using this corn will then be informed, explains the founder, and this could influence its price. These are informational data and not coercion or constraint, because the manufacturing sector decides on a plan for progress in ecological change, with farmers, cooperatives and industrialists, and this information will allow to know how each person progresses in this progress and its speed."

France 2030 winner at national and regional level

Only revealed by subscription (of several tens of thousands of euros per year) to agri-food professionals, this data makes it possible in particular to calculate the "Eco Score& quot; displayed on foods sold in Europe. "This score is displayed with a QR code which will allow everyone to view some of our information."The company also provides its data for the "Planet Score" label, developed by certain NGOs, UFC Que Choisir, certain manufacturers and distributors.

Funded for 5 years before its creation by a food group, Food Pilot has just raised 4.5 M€ with the local Irdi fund, the Bred bank, and a Parisian fund specializing in the agri-food industry. "He wishes to remain anonymous for the moment, because he will not bring his funds until next April", specifies Didier Livio. Funds supplemented by loans granted by BPI France and Caisse d'Epergne, to finance the development of the company, which plans to expand internationally next year .

The company, which counts several groups, sometimes international, among its clients, is a winner of the French development plan France 2030 at the national and regional levels, in particular to allow agri-food SMEs in Occitanie to benefit from its technology.

I subscribe to read more