Newsletter February 2023

Time to focus!

The project team for the Food Experience Centre has begun 2023 with a period of thought and reflection. The time is now ripe for us to focus our ideas and make them a little more concrete, something that we are doing in a series of internal workshops led by Elisabeth Ström of Priscia. At these workshops, we are attempting to find answers to the following questions, amongst others:

What is our core focus?
What is our vision for the whole site?
What is the mission of the actual Food Experience Centre?
What is our main target group?

The result will be a manifesto for the project that sharpens our focus and will help us to achieve our goals. We will have compiled the results by the time of the next newsletter, allowing us to present a summary.

The vision

We are staying with the original view of what we wanted to achieve, which is this:
Mjölby Municipality has an idea that involves working with other stakeholders to build a central hub and a unique experience centre all about food, its significance and its production. The enterprise will be a hotbed of learning, digitalisation and sustainability, with experiences for young and old alike. The Food Experience Centre will provide a showcase for the whole of the food industry, and its research, giving us glimpses into the future.

Positives for our partners

The founding principle of the initiative is that you, our partners, help to develop the concept together with Mjölby Municipality. The aim is for it to be a showcase for the entire food industry – created by the industry’s stakeholders.

It is now time to renew the Letter of Intent (LoI) that all our partners have signed. We hope you are keen to continue your involvement into the next phase, as we get even closer to establishing a globally unique Food Experience Centre. So partners please note – a new LoI will be coming shortly!

Who is our target audience?

In the first part of the workshop, we concluded that our main target audience is children and young people aged 6–12, and we will reach these primarily by welcoming school classes and families. Of course the experience centre will welcome everyone, but to enable us to create and focus on the right experiences, we need a focus group on which to concentrate as we take the project forward. Children and young people also represent tomorrow’s consumers, talent and business leaders. They will be the ones driving Swedish food production in a direction that is more sustainable over the long term!

Activities over the year

The manifesto is a necessary step to take before we begin to seek external partners and financiers in the latter part of the year. We will be working on this with Brakeley, who specialise in resource mobilisation, fundraising and philanthropic donations.

The presentation material, including the video outlining the vision, will be updated to bring it all in line with the new manifesto. It is also time to produce outline plans for the whole site, and specifically for the future building that will house the Food Experience Centre.

In the autumn, we will invite all our partners, including the working group for Väderstad, to a conference where we will present the internal work done so far and set out what we think businesses can do to get involved. Another activity planned for the autumn is a workshop with external parties where we jointly pin down the goal and direction of the project. The external workshop will be led by Bart Dohmen, who has had a hand in designing attractions such as Disneyland Paris, Legoland in Billund and the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam.

Industry engagement

The region’s food strategy is currently being updated, with the addition of a roadmap. We will naturally be giving input from Mjölby Municipality’s perspective, with a view to embedding the Food Experience Centre as a key communication channel aimed at the general public.

We are pleased to have become members of Agfo, a business network for the Swedish food system. This is a highly relevant forum for us to be involved with, and it will be interesting to follow their activities, which are always at the cutting edge.

This month (February), we will also be taking part in an exchange of knowledge and experience with Universeum in Gothenburg. We look forward to this, as we feel there are many similarities between their organisation and operation as a science centre and how we believe the Food Experience Centre will work. We are also pleased to have welcomed several new partners to the project. We look forward to exciting meetings in 2023 with many of you, our partners, and also with new contacts who will drive the project forward!

Warmest regards from the project team