Big ideas need good food: our day at TEDxMitte 2026

Some days stay with you. Saturday 17 October 2026 was one of them. In the middle of Berlin, on a beach, in the rain, around 300 people listened to nine ideas about a world that isn’t just changing but accelerating. We were there as a partner of TEDxMitte, with one job: make sure everyone was well fed for the next talk. This is how the day went, and what we took home from it.

TEDxMitte is an independent TEDx event, organised by volunteers in Berlin. 2026 was its third edition, held at BeachMitte under the theme ADAPT: Living in a Changing World. The organisers put the idea simply: adapting shouldn’t be a reaction to pressure, it should be a proactive decision.

Our co-founder and managing director Matteo Cricco took the TEDxMitte stage for his first TEDx. Watch the moment here: Matteo at TEDxMitte

Nine speakers took the stage, each with a different view on change:

• Isabelle Rogat, cultural trendscout: “How trained is your musculus simultanus?”
• Florian Tiller, co-founder and CEO of Ucaneo: “What if we run out of CO2?”
• Pascal Morgan, founder of think.speak.transform.: “5 steps to adapt to uncertainty”
• Vincent Haiges, documentary photographer: “Outside the Frame – Approaching a World in Transition”
• Dr. Isabella Hermann, Weizenbaum Institute: “Will the Future Be a Brutal Wasteland?”
• Uta Miryeong Weisse, Greenpeace Germany: “Learning from Populists How to Talk Climate”
• Bob Hanning, managing director of Füchse Berlin: “Kannst du auf morgen setzen – und heute gewinnen?”
• Prof. Dr. med. Dr. h.c. Jalid Sehouli, Charité: “Diversity in medicine saves lives”
• Johann Romefort, technology advisor and artist: “The Art of Debugging Complex Systems”

Between the talks, three performances changed the pace: a concert by Luminiah, an embodied experiment with Anouk Haller, and a community choir with YesChoir!

Our team arrived at noon, before the doors opened, to set up our booth with merch and a banner. Then came the main job: lunch. Our Bella&Bona bowls took care of around 300 guests, as well as the speakers and the organising team, served at the first break at 2:35 pm.

Event day logistics are a different game from our daily office lunch, but the idea is the same: fresh food from our own kitchens, delivered on time, so that people can stop thinking about food and get back to what they came for. The boxes made it up the stairs in the rain with a little help from the volunteers. Toasty Turtle, another food partner, kept the sweet side covered.

We don’t often get to say this, but being part of a day like this was a privilege. While TEDx is about ideas worth spreading, we think a good lunch is worth sharing too.

A day about change has plenty to offer any team. A few thoughts that stayed with people in the room:

• Adapting is a decision, not a reaction. The theme itself: change doesn’t wait, so choose how you meet it.
• Notice when your map has expired. Pascal Morgan’s talk started from a simple question: what do you do when the map you have no longer matches the reality you’re living in? His steps began with being aware of the old map and ended with taking the next step.
• Try “and” instead of “or”. Isabelle Rogat’s idea that several perspectives can be true at once.
• Build for the people, not just the tools. Volunteers told us that adapting isn’t only about new skills or technology, it’s about the people who help us through change. Our view: shared moments, like a lunch together, are one of the simplest ways to build that. We wrote about it in why shared meals beat bonuses.

• The weather took the theme personally. It rained, and everyone carried on.
• A beach in autumn. Sand in everyone’s sneakers, in the middle of Berlin.
• A room turned choir. YesChoir! got 300 people singing, and the day ended with the whole room singing “Hey Jude”.
• The team behind it. More than 50 volunteers from all over the world, who made every guest feel welcome.

A big thank you to the whole TEDxMitte team for having us, and to everyone who came.