Securing international IP Rights for Food tech Innovation: Prolonging shelf-life of plant-based products

DIE FRISCHEMNAUFAKTUR (DFM) is a food tech start-up from Saxony-Anhalt a structural week region in Eastern Germany. The deep tech food start-up was founded by Dr. Jenny Müller in 2017. Our female founder is still full-time operating CEO and leading the company to grow further.

DFM specializes in developing ground-breaking food-technology aiming to prolong the shelf-life of plant-based ultra-fresh products like e.g. fresh-cut fruits, salads and drinks.

The very short shelf-life of 1-4 days leads to a huge amount of food-waste in private households and retail, as they have to throw away perished products.With its innovation and overall vision of DIE FRISCHEMAUFAKTUR tackles two societal challenges: 1.Reducing and preventing unnecessary food waste and thus efficient use of resources and battling hunger2.Making healthy eating easy and convenientDFM develops production processes to create products, that last far longer than competitive products.

The prolongation of shelf-life can be up to factor 30. E.g. DFM developed a process to make fresh-cut pineapple chunks last up to 6 weeks. For this process patents are filed.

The best performing product is: fruit and herb infused water.Adding fruit to water is the most natural way to give water a delicious taste – without added sugars, sweeteners or anything.

DFM has developed a patented process that solves the short shelf life and offers infused water with 3 months shelf-life. Two patents for the production process of infused water in Germany were already granted. An International PCT patent was filed. Still, in Q1 2022 DFM has to decide for which countries in the world a patent shall be pursued.

For each country significant costs of 3-10 TEUR arise.

Covering those costs is extremely difficult for a start-up, still having a valid patent in the most important countries worldwide can offer a big chance, too.A grant from Women TechEU would allow to file patents for China, Japan, India, Brazil, Canada, Mexico etc.