NASA names the winners of its Mars to Table food prize
A modular farm that recycles its own nutrients has taken NASA's $300,000 Mars to Table prize for feeding a 15-person crew on the Red Planet.
NASA has named the five winners of its Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table, a contest that asked teams to design a whole food system for a crew on Mars rather than another clever component. The top prize of $300,000 went to Chinyere Ukeje of Philadelphia for Adaptive Nourishment Infrastructure, or ANI.
What won
ANI is a modular food ecosystem that combines controlled-environment agriculture, fermentation and fungi cultivation with closed-loop nutrient recycling through bioreactors. The target is to produce 50 per cent of a crew's food away from Earth while leaning as little as possible on what is launched from it. The name comes from the Nigerian Earth goddess of harvest and fertility, and the design carries enough slack to keep cooking fresh meals daily through shortages of power, water, equipment or crew time.
Second place and $200,000 went to Cislune of Rosemead, California, for Fresh, Ferment, Reserve, which grows selected crops, turns part of the harvest into familiar foods in instrumented culture cassettes, and keeps a protected Earth-loaded reserve for the weeks when biology or the power supply misbehave. The remaining prizes went to Ohā Kanu of Hilo, Hawaii, for an ahupuaʻa-inspired system, which took the Applied Frameworks Award; Orbital Health Systems of Evansville, Indiana, with New Lunar Settlers, which took the Mission Simulation Award; and Astrofood of Ellezelles, Belgium, with the Food Resilience Ecosystem for Space Habitats, which won the international prize. Each was worth $50,000.
Why you should care
Astronaut meals are still almost entirely cooked, packaged and shipped to the International Space Station from the Space Food Systems Laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Center. A one-way trip to Mars takes at least nine months, so pre-packaged food cannot be the default: shelf stability and mass both rule it out. Teams had to design against a mission scenario of a 15-person crew working for 500 Martian sols, about 513 Earth days, and hand over a layout, a meal plan, a concept of operations and a walkthrough video.
The field was serious. NASA judged 113 submissions from teams in 33 countries and 28 US states before picking its five winners and awarding $650,000 in total. Mars to Table launched in January 2026 as a follow-on to the original Deep Space Food Challenge, which the agency ran from 2021 to 2024 with the Canadian Space Agency; that first round wanted prototype production methods, while this one wanted integrated systems.
“We're thrilled to keep advancing the future of space food systems with this challenge,” said Jennifer Edmunson, programme manager for Centennial Challenges at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “The future of human space exploration will rely on innovative food systems, and it is amazing how much ingenuity this challenge has helped us identify from participants near and far.”
“The criteria we laid out for this competition were challenging, but intentionally so,” said head judge Dr Alexander Meyers, who supports NASA Centennial Challenges through Noetic Strategies from the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “This challenge spotlights the complexity of a complete space food system and the human ingenuity required to solve these problems.”
Our opinion
The interesting shift in this competition is that NASA stopped asking for hardware. The first Deep Space Food Challenge was a hunt for production methods; Mars to Table wanted a defensible plan for a whole diet, with the unglamorous arithmetic attached. That is a harder brief and a more useful one, because the failure mode on a Mars mission will not be a gadget that does not work, it will be a menu that cannot absorb a bad harvest. ANI's willingness to budget for shortages of power, water and crew time is the most telling detail in the winning entry. Missions are lost to contingency, not to ambition, and a food system that assumes smooth running is a food system that fails in month four. Whether fungi and bioreactors are the right answer is a question for the next decade; insisting on the question is the step that matters now.