Prof. Dr. Tilo Hühn

ZHAW

Tilo Hühn is a FoodArchitect and inventor designing regenerative food processes, cultivating the unknown with teams across science and industry, bridging chaos and impact, leading food automation initiatives, and driving ecosystems.

Presentation:
Delegated photosynthesis: leveraging plant intelligence for next-gen foods

Key Points:
• Plants as information systems: Plants do not only produce biomass; through photosynthesis they encode environmental information into molecular states that guide adaptive metabolism.
• From fruits to functions: Next-generation food systems shift from harvesting plant outputs to extracting, combining, and redeploying plant-derived molecular signals as functional building blocks.
• Delegated photosynthesis: Photosynthesis is functionally delegated by transferring its molecular outcomes—energy, precursors, and regulatory signals—into engineered bioprocesses.
• Designing metabolic environments: Food quality, flavor, and functionality emerge from the informational environment of metabolism (medium, energy flows, stress profiles), not from ingredients alone.
• A new design paradigm for food: Innovation moves from product formulation to condition design—leveraging plant intelligence to create resilient, regenerative, and programmable food systems.