This year’s 50 Next group of Entrepreneurial Creatives have taken their passion and business acumen and used it to help the world. Their companies eschew profit in favour of progress, allowing each purchase and contribution to directly affect lives with positivity, fairness and equality. After meeting the Tech Disruptors, Hospitality Pioneers and Empowering Educators, today we introduce seven people with a hivemind that benefits us all
Ata Cengiz
The son of a five-century farming dynasty connecting Turkish produce with the world
The disconnect between producer and consumer had always bothered Ata Cengiz, whose family run an arable farm in rural Turkey. Since he was a young boy, he wondered why it took so long to get his family’s produce to market, and observed how the layers of process showed a disregard for the people who grow, rear and care for the food that will end up on restaurant diners’ plates.
Ata made it his mission to make this connection more straightforward and equitable for those at the beginning of the faming cycle. As a result, he created the website tarlamvar.com, which allows customers to ‘own’ a tree and the fruit it bears. The process promises to allow farms to double or triple their income on signing up and meanwhile create sustainable business models for years to come.
Learn more about Ata
Check out tarlamvar.com
Jon Gray
The mixed-media storyteller empowering underprivileged communities
With his project Ghetto Gastro, Jon Gray distributes food to seniors, people of colour, low-income families and formerly incarcerated individuals in the Bronx, New York City. He confronts inequality head on and encourages discussion through storytelling, challenging common tropes in mainstream media and assumed knowledge about his community.
Jon says that Ghetto Gastro intends to disrupt the market and is about “showing you what we already know: the hood is good”. His collective, which he launched with chefs Lester Walker and Pierre Serrao in 2012, has collaborated with companies including Apple, Bank of America and Cartier on a variety of projects, from dishes to sculptures, T-shirts to large-scale events. Their work spans creative strategy, experiential activations and product development, using the Bronx’s innate creativity to turn it into a world-class art destination and to promote diverse young talent.
Learn more about Jon
Check out Ghetto Gastro
Sana Javeri Kadri
The Indian changemaker decolonising the spice trade
A Mumbai native plying her trade in the US, Sana Javeri Kadri saw two key issues with the spices that were available to her as a home cook in Oakwood, Georgia. One, that they were of poor quality compared to what she had access to at home; and two, that the farmers in India were compensated as little as 1% of the final price that she paid in her local supermarket. In her senior year at Pomona College, Sana began researching postcolonialism and working on the idea of decolonising the spice trade. The driving force of her project was to make it as profitable for India as possible.
At the core of Sana’s work is an online spice importing business selling stylishly packaged chillies, turmeric, cumin and many more. Her company Diaspora Co. aims to put power and resources into indigenous spice farming and create a radically new and equitable vision of the trade. Sana and her team work directly with farmers across India, paying them a fair price for single-origin, heirloom spices that are sustainable, equitable and unlike any comparable products on the market. She says that ‘Made in India’ too often means fertilizer overuse, farmer suicide and worker abuse. If her first year trading is anything to go by, this is all about to change.
Learn more about Sana
Check our Diaspora Co.
Adelaide Lala Tam
The Hong Kong designer reverse-engineering the food production process
After making the move from Hong Kong to the Netherlands, Adelaide Lala Tam made a promise to herself to confront industrial food production processes through her art. Using mixed-media installations, she dismantles food production by encouraging consumers to examine their own relationship with the things that they eat and their own responsibilities in the process.
Adelaide is one of the most exciting talents in the global modern art ecosystem and she has her crosshairs trained on unscrupulous mass-producers and the people who buy products linked to intrusive farming. As an example, in her artwork 0.9 Grams of Brass, she created a vending machine distributing only paperclips. These clips were each moulded from a brass cartridge casing used in a bovine slaughterhouse, which users only become aware of after interacting with the machine. It is her theory that as an everyday object, the paperclip marks a constant reminder of the animal’s loss of life.
Adelaide will be presenting her artistic theory at Food Meets Talent, in partnership with S.Pellegrino, which forms part of the event programme for The World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2021 in Antwerp, Flanders, on 4th October this year.
Learn more about Adelaide
Check out her art
Divya Mohan
The India-born innovator tackling plastic use with edible straws
It was the realisation that plastic straws were the seventh greatest polluter of the world’s oceans that made Divya Mohan set about creating a simple, sustainable solution. One billion straws are used every day globally and by re-engineering such a simple item’s construction, she could make a big change with a relatively straight-forward idea.
Divya launched Ooble, a start-up that makes edible straws from cereal flours and plant oils. While paper straws go soggy and metal ones are mainly decorative, Ooble’s edible straws remain sturdy in liquids for over 45 minutes, allowing consumers to eat them once they’ve finished their drink. They’re currently available in chocolate or cinnamon and will eventually be sold in flavours that complement the drink, be it a cocktail, smoothie or juice.
Just the first in a long line of simple solutions to polluting problems, Divya has plenty more in the pipeline in the months and years to come.
Get to know Divya
Check out Ooble
Thiago Vinícius De Paula Da Silva
The Brazilian community leader tackling violence with culture, art and culinary initiatives
Food, art and culture are at the core of transforming under-privileged communities, according to Thiago Vinícius De Paula Da Silva. Barely out of his teens, he had already established a community bank, helped reduce food waste in his region of Campo Limpo on the outskirts of southern São Paulo and took it upon himself to educate his neighbourhood on how to upcycle discarded items.
In 2012, Thiago Vinícius created Agência Solano Trindade, a network of entrepreneurs from the outskirts of São Paulo that connects culture, arts, teaching programmes and culinary initiatives to form an inspiring method for development within a complex community. The improvement to his part of São Paulo has been profound and he is already looking at how he can extrapolate his learnings to similar pockets of Brazil.
Learn more about Thiago Vinícius
Check out Agência Solano Trindade
Natsuko Shoji
The Japanese cake queen turning pastry into fashion
You may not be familiar with Natsuko Shoji’s name, but it’s very likely you will have seen her work populating the Instagram feeds of the likes of David Beckham and René Redzepi. As cake curator to the stars, she designs seriously intricate patisserie by commission, perhaps most famously creating a near-perfect replica of a Louis Vuitton handbag that made the news worldwide.
A rarity in Japan’s male-dominated gastronomy scene, Natsuko is an inspiration to young women, whom she hopes to encourage to enter the craft. She sets an example by emphasising that true success comes from a commitment to the kitchen and by continually pushing herself to do better – a work ethic that helped her win the title of Asia’s Best Pastry Chef in 2020.
Learn more about Natsuko
Check out her restaurant, été
Keep an eye on the 50 Next website for more developments and for information on how to apply and nominate for next year’s list
