What must the world of tomorrow look like for you personally? And where is the best food you've ever eaten? The answers to these questions (and many more) are available once a month in our Snack, the Kitchen Stories business questionnaire.
“Everything we do is focused on understanding the future, making change possible and making utopias a reality.”
Luke: If you're thinking about what the world of tomorrow must look like, you should remember for a moment what it is likely to look like if we continue doing what we are doing right now, particularly in the area of economics. We have an economy that is destroying its own foundations: Ecosystems and functioning social systems and, as a result of their growth imperative, the planet degenerate to the point of human inhabitability.
The question here is more What economic growth can look like, which works in a very similar way to that in nature, In other words, it does not degrade ecosystems, but regenerates them and makes a positive contribution to maintaining and renewing our livelihoods in the long term. And this is exactly where our vision for companies in a world of tomorrow comes from, with an economy that sustains and enables a tomorrow worth living in.
Jule: Crazily enough, we live in times where that everlasting narrative of a better future It seems to be coming to an end. This is an impressive change in cultural history — we must first understand this transformation in our heads. This goes against an enormous number of familiar thought patterns.
Me as futurologist This change concerns in particular, because in this context I am often asked how it is even possible to draw a positive picture of the future, a space of opportunity for development, while we are confronted with the gradual destruction of our livelihoods to an ever greater extent in the media, but also in the world of life.
Accordingly, in many of our projects — whether innovative projects, lectures, or our own ventures, in abstract terms, we work to collectively increase individual effectiveness, to counteract a sense of anxiety with a sense of self-effectiveness, of creativity. We need radically creative solutions which will continue to preserve our social coexistence in regenerative business models in the future — this is not about incremental innovations, about improving established approaches on a small scale, but about fundamentally different types of added value that have a regenerative effect in the best sense of the word.
To get back to the question: Our world of the future should be worth living in. In our world of the future, everyone has creative self-confidence, i.e. the security of being able to change something with their own actions. With these qualities, positive changes are initiated in professional and private life for a happy life individually and collectively.
Luke: That means we'll have understood How we as humanity (again!) can be a constructive actor in the planetary ecosystem. That may sound a lot like cliché, green romance, back to the roots and Garden of Eden. But that is only one side of the coin. In view of the scale of the challenges, we will not be able to avoid using the technological progress of recent years as an essential basis for this - but now no longer as an end in itself of pure economic growth, but consistently as a means of achieving human resilience.
Jule: Rely on the innovative and driving power of employees! Because often enough, change is dictated purely “from above.” When it comes to sustainability transformation, however, employees are often much further along than management, which has spent the last few years deporting sustainability, if at all, to either compliance, the CSR or marketing department. For employees, however, this issue has often been a life purpose or at least once a passion and that can and should be used in a targeted manner. Because when it comes to innovation development, the personal drive of those involved in the process is a very important element for success.
Luke: And we don't mean that in terms of pure “grassroots” initiatives. There must also be a strategic rethink “from above”, because sustainable or even regenerative economies will be the competitive factor par excellence in the 21st century. The sustainability transformation is strategically a megatrend that should in no way be underestimated, whose dynamism is disruptive and, above all, unstoppable.
Integrating sustainability into the core of all innovation projects and ultimately also into all other departments — that is the only sensible way for anyone who is moving away from purely short-term analysis. And even in the short term, in view of the current gas crisis, for example, it is already paying off - renewable energies are already ensuring economic resilience in the here and now.
Luke: With HOLYCRAB! Let us entrepreneurially address one of the biggest drivers of the currently rapidly advancing species extinction: invasive species. An animal or plant species is considered invasive if it has been moved by humans from one ecosystem to another and has negative effects there, such as the suppression of other species, etc. In Berlin, the Red American swamp crab has become such a colloquial “plague” that causes problems in various urban waters. However, this species is also the most-bred crayfish in the world.
The species is usually imported en masse from China or the USA for catering, which is why we found it questionable that such a crab does not supposedly find any natural predators in our ecosystem. What is wrong with us humans? With HOLYCRAB! So let's turn the scourge into a delicacy and turn people back into constructive actors in the food chain who enjoy saving their own ecosystem.
Jule: After testing the concept for a year with a food truck on the streets of Berlin and then narrowly escaped insolvency during the pandemic, our products are now on sale all over Germany. This year, we also started fishing ourselves. Our two fishermen are currently active in Tiergarten and Britzer Garten in Berlin and harvest large quantities of invasive crayfish that do not actually belong there in order to prevent their spread. We are therefore part of a nature protection measure taken by the Berlin Senate.
It is sold to wholesalers and restaurants - in Horvath, for example, crayfish is on the menu every day - and it is also possible to order fresh Berlin crabs throughout Germany via an online shop. Or you can take a trip to KaDeWe again - in the delicatessen department on the 6th floor, you can also stock up for home.
Luke: In the future, we will join HOLYCRAB! Work even more intensively on the development of principles of regenerative fishing and thus completely redefine sustainable fish. We want to implement a type of water management that leads to more biodiversity and higher water quality, so that water bodies also become much more resilient to the effects of climate change.
Jule: Sure, sometimes we want to bury our heads in the sand and think about whether it isn't already too late and we should just sit on the beach and drink a few cocktails. And maybe that would even be the solution if everyone kept it that way. In the end, however, it is the case that we are all always and constantly shaping the future - whether consciously or unconsciously. Even if we don't do anything, something happens, just probably not what we would have liked.
And that is why we decided instead to push the whole barge in a direction that we think is desirable. Especially because we see the opportunity for people to be positive actors on this planet. Despair often comes from realizing that it would be better if we all didn't exist. But anyone who deals with the mechanisms of a regenerative economy knows that there is another way! And that is exactly where we want to go.
Jule: For me, the best food literally grows on trees. I love hiking through the vineyards in my old home in the Palatinate and enjoying the figs straight from the wayside. One of my favorite restaurants from recent years is the Leutendroter in Ostend in Frankfurt am Main. We also spent the evening before our wedding there and the cuisine and ambiance are simply great!
Luke: Okay then I'll start with the simple things too. No star restaurant can beat my grandma's cheese spätzle! For certainly a very exciting menu, we want to stop by our good friend Jonathan Kartenberg at eins44 in Berlin in the near future.
Thank you so much for the interview.
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