Igeho Rising Star Award 2025: Celebrating Innovation Shaping the Future of Hospitality
Eva Mai
Innovation often begins with a simple idea, a more efficient process, a smarter system or a more sustainable ingredient. With the Igeho Rising Star Award 2025, these ideas take center stage. Now in its second edition, the award highlights young companies that rethink the future of hospitality and bring transformative and sustainable solutions to the Swiss food and beverage landscape. After months of anticipation and a dynamic public voting phase, five selected start-ups presented their concepts live at Igeho 2025, and Catchfree was announced as the winner.
Created in partnership with the Swiss Food & Nutrition Valley, the Igeho Rising Star initiative provides a dedicated platform for early-stage innovators who often lack the visibility needed to accelerate their growth. By elevating promising concepts and connecting start-ups with key stakeholders across gastronomy, food production and technology, the award demonstrates how collaboration can advance an entire sector.
The five finalists represent a wide spectrum of solutions, ranging from alternative proteins to circular logistics. Catchfree, now the 2025 award winner, develops plant-based fish and seafood alternatives made from minimally processed mushroom protein and rice, providing a sustainable and ocean-friendly option in familiar formats such as tuna, salmon or fish bites. Circunis addresses food waste with a digital marketplace for surplus goods, ensuring that edible products can be redistributed efficiently. Foodflows strengthens the connection between farms and kitchens and enables restaurants to source locally, transparently and with a reduced environmental footprint. GoNina uses artificial intelligence to forecast demand and reduce overproduction, making daily operations both more efficient and more sustainable. Yumame Foods explores the potential of fungi-based foods and shows how fermentation can unlock nutritious, scalable and lower-impact alternatives.
Together, these finalists illustrate the breadth of innovation emerging across the Swiss food-tech ecosystem and the potential for positive, sustainable change when ideas are nurtured early. Their presence at Igeho 2025 introduces visitors to new business models and inspires a broader rethinking of how hospitality can operate more responsibly and efficiently.
For Benjamin Eulau, Exhibition Director of Igeho, this mission remains central:
“It is our role to give these innovations a stage and make their potential visible. Our industry depends on fresh ideas that strengthen the resilience and sustainability of the hospitality ecosystem, and we are committed to supporting the people who drive them forward.”
With Catchfree taking home the title, the Igeho Rising Star Award 2025 once again shows how innovation can take root and evolve when given the opportunity to grow and how the ideas presented today will help shape the hospitality sector of tomorrow.
