Baptiste Pageot, from MyFood

"We are a little UFO at CES“, Concedes Baptiste Pageot. Sales manager of MyFood, the young Frenchman presents to the public at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas (until January 10) a beautiful greenhouse, posed in the entrance of the French Tech pavilion, in the heart of Eureka Park, the exhibition space dedicated to start-ups from around the world.

Since Tuesday, curious people have been crowding inside this greenhouse where salads and other herbs grow, designed to allow everyone to produce vegetables. The greenhouse brings together different technologies and techniques (aquaponics, permaculture, connected tools to generate data on the greenhouse, solar panels, etc.) intended to facilitate production throughout the year in urban areas.

The Alsatian MyFood is one of the many young pushes to promote French environmental tech at CES, a great showcase for tomorrow's technologies. This year, around twenty companies, active in the fields of mobility, intelligent building, fight against food waste, green packaging or even urban agriculture and AgTech (agricultural tech), made the trip, in this city which is not known for its environmentalism. Their ambition: to get investors, the press or simply contacts to test their concept. "The French have a base of common values ​​around what we eat and the taste for simple good things. The latter pass through plants. That's why we grow our greenhouse and assume that we want to eat good fresh products.“, Says Baptiste Pageot, whose parents had a vegetable garden. With 200 greenhouses around the world, including Qatar, MyFood is now targeting the American market. "Given the size of the US market and the price of organic food, we figured there was an interest in us being here.".

A few steps away, Quentin Rousselot and Elsa Maccario also practice urban agriculture. But instead of a greenhouse, they offer turnkey vegetable gardens as part of their small business Agrove, run by The Camp, the futuristic accelerator of Aix-en-Provence. They too came to CES in the hope of eventually developing in the United States. Immediately, they came to find press and companies likely to validate their product. "People need meaning. Urban agriculture is a problem for the future and we are positioning ourselves on it. As it is politically complicated, the solution will come from companies“, Believes Quentin Rousselot, son of a farmer.

Greening and beautifying cities is also the problem that Olivier Ayasse, an architecture and gardening enthusiast who has spent twenty years working in the Internet of Things, wants to respond to. From these different areas of interest, he created an app called Connected Garden where a virtual gardener, Archibald, helps individuals optimize the use of their garden. After installing a sensor in the lawn, "Archie" indicates for example which flowers are best suited to the green space. Using augmented reality, the app also signals which plants need to be cared for and how to do it. The entrepreneur met several potential investors "solid”At this 2020 show, second CES for him. "Their appetite for Clean Tech or Green Tech is based on the expectations of millennials. If we don't green our cities, the future will be complicated“, Says Olivier Ayasse.

Mobility was also well represented. Electric scooters from Green Riders were there, as was the RideSVP car-sharing service, Coleen electric bikes and the three-wheeled solar cargo bike from Saint-Denis de la Réunion Wello, one of the tricolor stars of 'Eureka Park. "We had a lot of press“, Says Mélodie Ribeiro. The start-up was able to test its light vehicle, used by La Poste and EDF among others, over 30 kilometers in the Red Rock Canyon outside Vegas, in the Mojave Desert, and along the “Strip”, this long tourist artery where the city's major casino hotels are located. The product is not yet sold abroad, but that may change. At CES, Wello got hints from buyers in Florida and California. "We are thinking about exporting“, Specifies Mélodie Ribeiro. The world needs it.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here