Egyptian F&B Startups ByBike and Baked Win PepsiCo's "Snacks Innovation Challenge"

PepsiCo announced on December 5^th the winners of the Snacks Innovation Challenge: ByBike, a food-on-bike startup, and Baked, an on-demand bakery startup. The two winners won a five-week online management course at the Madrid-based IE business school, which is one of the top 10 business schools in the world.

PepsiCo joined hands with Ahead of the Curve (ATC), a business-development organisation, to challenge entrepreneurs to re-envision snacks packaging design as an environmentally friendly practice. Other challenges included creating what they believe would be the future of packaging, developing a premium healthy snack that consumers can enjoy between meals, breaking their boredom and de-stressing from life pressures, and developing new digital technologies, tools that can be utilised to deliver strong brand experience and engage consumers with PepsiCo brands.

The challenge was announced at RiseUp 2017 and had admitted 30 teams that attended the bootcamp at KMT House, and were exposed to a diversity of different industries. During the course of the bootcamp, the teams were offered consultancy and technical assistance, as well as programmes that ranged from knowledge and advocacy, training and capacity building, to entrepreneurship with impact venture. Out of the 30, only nine projects were selected to the final phase, to which a committee of judges evaluated the projects as per certain criteria.

With this challenge, PepsiCo proves its commitment to encouraging healthy lifestyle, improving the availability of affordable nutrition, and enhancing sustainable agriculture capability. Expanding this commitment to include entrepreneurship, would acknowledge the added value that comes along in merging its commitments with the startup landscape.

The challenge comes inline with PepsiCo's 2025 sustainability global strategy “Performance with Purpose,” designed to continuously improve the products in the market, protect the planet and empower people around the world.

Entrepreneurs are flourishing in Egypt, cultivating a culture of innovation and creating job opportunities. PepsiCo aspires to play its part in supporting the entrepreneurship ecosystem by creating, launching and executing a programme to identify early growth stage startups in the F&B industry.

The content of this article has been sponsored.