How do you educate people to transform a food system? Since 2022, the Master’s degree programme in Preneurship for Regenerative Food Systems, or PREFS, has been trying to do just that. The programme trains, among others, founders of sustainable food initiatives, consultants in the public sector and project managers working for international organisations.
Conventional approaches in the food industry generally focus on efficiency and minimising harm: less food waste, lower emissions and more efficient use of resources. PREFS starts from a different premise: not how a system can become less harmful, but how it can actively contribute to the renewal of environmental, social and economic resources. Within the degree programme, this approach is referred to as regenerative.
In this context, regenerative means systems that continuously renew themselves biologically, socially and economically. Resources are actively replenished, with the system adapting to change and ultimately generating more value than it consumes.
PREFS Master’s degree programme
Alban Muret
Managing Director at Foodward
“PREFS taught me to understand systems – and to play an active part in shaping them. Today, I run an organisation that connects and supports industry, research institutions and start-ups in order to advance sustainable innovation in the food system.”
Knowledge, practice, impact
The value of the degree programme can be seen on three levels. In terms of subject matter, PREFS teaches specific skills – ranging from food technology, business-model development and financing to systems thinking and the increasingly important use of artificial intelligence.
These skills are anchored in practice through the Agro Food Project, which runs across all four semesters of the programme: in this project, students work in interdisciplinary teams on real-world challenges from the worlds of business, research and NGOs – for example in areas such as the circular economy or climate change. They collaborate with partners like Foodward, Soil to Soul and the Swiss Food & Nutrition Valley.
A third of the degree is self-designed
The degree programme comprises 90 ECTS credits and can be completed in between four and eight semesters depending on the chosen study workload. One of its distinct features is the high degree of flexibility in terms of content: around a third of the credits are put together by the students themselves, through elective modules offered across five ZHAW Schools as well as through freely defined individual skills projects. In addition, students take part in Disruption Days – block weeks focusing on unexpected future challenges.
The openness of the format is illustrated by the example of student Fabiano De Gani,who used his part-time job as a pizzaiolo in Zurich for his individual skills module: he developed a new dough-making process for Neapolitan pizza and introduced it at the pizzeria, from the choice of flour right through to training the team.
Small by design
Cohorts are deliberately kept small. This creates a close relationship between students, lecturers and industry partners. At the same time, it means that PREFS has so far only trained a limited number of specialists relative to what would actually be required for a transformation of the food system. Whether this programme could evolve beyond serving a relatively small target group has been a question accompanying the degree programme since its inception. Increasingly, however, this question is being answered by the degree programme’s graduates, who are shaping the food industry in Switzerland and beyond towards a more regenerative future.
