Online - Offline

CONNECTING AND LEARNING WITH LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE
FROM AROUND THE GLOBE

After more than 26 years of navigating the creative landscape—teaching in classrooms, mentoring in private settings, and shaping ideas like dough in curious hands—I’ve decided it’s time to open the doors wider. To make the knowledge I’ve gathered more accessible, more shareable, more alive.

It started with the Food and Design online courses—carefully crafted programs that let you stir your creativity from anywhere in the world. Now, those courses have found a physical home too. You can get your training live, in person, and on site at the Food Design Playground in Dordrecht—a space where ideas ferment, rituals are born, and imagination is plated.

Online, you can dive into the Food and Design Dive, explore further with the Advanced Dive, or spend summer crafting your own conceptual dinner in the Summer School.

Offline, you’re invited to a 4-day retreat—an immersive experience where you’ll shape your own conceptual dinner—or take a one-day Deep Dive and design a personal morning ritual to nourish your days.

If 4 days are too much, we also offer one day food design immersions. See the dates here.

At the core of all this is a simple wish: to help shape a more sensitive, meaningful world.

What excites me most is watching the ripple effect: people around the globe using creative thinking with food as their medium. They enrich their local communities, build unexpected businesses, and feed new ways of relating—with joy, depth, and often a little rebellion.

By supporting them—and also non-food creatives—with tools for creative resilience, the circle completes itself. What we put on the table changes what’s possible in the world.

Now a global movement, my work has been on display all over the world…

...from the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum to the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York and it has been published extensively from the New York times to Wallpaper magazine and ICON magazine.

I began my journey with food and design at Design Academy Eindhoven in 1999 and 2000 I opened my eating-design studio in addition to creating food-related experiences around the globe.

My studio included two experimental restaurants, both named PROEF, meaning to experiment. With locations in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, the restaurants operated between 2004 and 2011.

Following that, I was head of a new department at the Design Academy Eindhoven called Food Non-Food between 2014 and 2022

In 2016 I founded the Dutch institute of Food and Design, a global platform for Food and Design. We launched the world’s first Food Design Award: The Future Food Design Award.

In 2024, I was awarded the FoodA oeuvre award at Food Design fest and became Honorary member at Fork organisation.

In 2024 and 2025, I’m project professor at Kunsthochschule Kassel and I started Food Design playground.

I continue to work—and play—across many of the fields that have shaped my journey, while also creating spaces for others to dive deep into the world of food and design. Together, we explore how to tap into your creative potential using tools and systems that help you rise, flow, and bring your most vibrant self to the table.

DON’T JUST TAKE MY WORD FOR IT. HERE ARE A HANDFUL OF MY STUDENTS WHO ARE ALREADY APPLYING THEIR NEW SKILLS.

Thanks to your knowledge & perspectives, I’m now exploring what suits me and for the first time I feel I’m on a weird, fun, and meaningful path.

Niki Karatza, Food Creative

Your course was a pleasure, the remarkable insights upgraded my creative tools, and all in a calm, clear, and inspiring way. Thank you!

Amit Mestechkin, Food and Design Dive student and UNISG student

Thank you for making your knowledge accessible for a wider audience & allowing the freedom to work on ourselves & our practice without pushing.

Tosca Waeber, Student of Food and Design Dive and Creative Strategies