Theme award 2023: New crops, new applications

The Horticulture Entrepreneur Award will again be awarding a Theme Award in 2023. The theme for 2023 is ‘New crops, new applications’: a competition for the most innovative and groundbreaking new application or new crop. The Horticulture Entrepreneur Award is organising the theme award this year in collaboration with Greenport West-Holland, which has its own programme in this area - Biobased Greenport West-Holland. Together we thereby want to show how varied and innovative the Dutch horticulture cluster is.

We are seeing new crops and cultivation methods being developed in the Netherlands that can offer specific solutions to the challenges that confront our society today. Crops of new products that are used for applications other than consumption and decorative value, and new or smarter cultivation methods which enable the sector to innovate and make an important contribution to greater sustainability. Crops that can offer specific solutions to the challenges that confront our society today; not just with molecules, but also with fibres from waste streams, for example. Crops both outdoors in the soil and in greenhouses.

This might include applications in the area of paper, plastic and building materials that reduce the carbon footprint, ornamental crops for use in cosmetics, medicine, etc. Crops with big opportunities for future sustainability.

For this Theme Award, the Horticulture Entrepreneur Award is looking for Dutch entrepreneurs, companies, projects and initiatives that are developing new crops and/or developing new applications and business models for greater value extraction from (horticulture) waste streams, medicine, new sustainable (biobased) materials and much more in a unique way. We are looking for innovations where at least the technical feasibility of the innovation has been proved (Technology Readiness Level 8 or 9).