From oddity to household name Koen Peters spearheaded the OPTIMUS program, which is part of a digital revolution within the World Food Programme. The resulting savings have generated enough money to provide food for 2 million people for a year. Text: Mirna van Dijk
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s an econometrics student, Koen Peters already knew that solving logistics problems would be in his future. But that he would cash in on his head for mathematics in the business world was something he doubted more and more with every class. “The focus was very often on the same kind of business examples: logistics, transport, investments, how to set up a pension system.... You learn to solve things like that using data and mathematics, but I didn’t find the topics all that exciting.” That’s why Peters looked outside the box for fields of work that were a little less obvious. At a conference on food insecurity, the penny dropped. “There, a former agriculture minister told us that there are 800 million people who don’t have enough to eat, even though there is enough food available worldwide. That sounded like the kind of problem I wanted to tackle: how do you get those products to the right place at the right time?”
Koen Peters: “It took several years to convince everyone in the organization of what you can do with data science and analytics.”
22 | New Scientist | Special Zero Hunger Lab
BRAM BELLONI
Thirty specialists Within Tilburg University, Peters began looking for thesis options. This led him to Hein Fleuren, now director of the Zero Hunger Lab. With Fleuren’s help, he arranged a master’s internship with the UN World Food Programme (WFP). During his internship in 2014, Peters spearheaded the creation of the ingenious
