World Food Day 2025
Playing Our Way Out of the Hunger Crisis: How the Sufosec Alliance Brought a Food Systems Escape Game to Switzerland
What does it take to feed the world – fairly, sustainably, and for generations to come? On October 9, 2025, the Sufosec Alliance took that question to the Bundesplatz in Bern and turned it into a game.
A New Kind of World Food Day
Every year, World Food Day on October 16 is an opportunity to reflect on the state of global food systems and the urgent need to transform them. In 2025, Sufosec, the Alliance for food security and sustainable agriculture, of which Skat Foundation is a member, joined forces with Agroecology Works! to mark the occasion with something different: an interactive escape game that made the complexity of the global food crisis tangible, playful, and impossible to ignore.
The results was Escape Hunger – Raus aus der Hungerkrise: a fully equipped, purpose-built escape game housed in a 20-foot container, designed and built by Time Maze, that took players on a 25-minute journey through the interconnected challenges of soil, seeds, water, and climate justice.
The Game: Puzzles with a Point
The escape game was designed for groups of two to four players and built around four puzzles, each tackling a core dimension of today’s food crisis: the health of our soils, access to seeds, water governance, and climate justice. The puzzles weren’t just fun – they were carefully constructed to surface the trade-offs and systemic tensions that make food security such complex challenge.
After each round, a structured debriefing session connected the game’s fictional scenarios to real-world challenges and solutions, ensuring that the experience stayed with players well beyond the container door.
The concept emerged from a creative process with the communications agency Feinheit and was brought to life under the project leadership of Barbara Schmidt, with Christian Heuss leading communications. The event’s communications work was planned and executed by the Sufosec Communications Group – of which Skat Foundation was an active member, contributing planning, communications materials, and hands-on support on the day itself.
Launch Day on the Bundesplatz
The official launch took place on October 9, 2025 – a week ahead of World Food Day itself. Round 100 people gathered on one of Switzerland’s most symbolic public squares for two rounds of the escape game, played by a cross-party cast that brought the event’s themes to life in vivid, sometimes surprising ways.
Players included Awraris Girma (Injera), Martin Huggenberger (Weltacker), Markus Allemann (Swissaid), and Flurina Doppler (Agroecology Works!), alongside politicians from across the political spectrum: Alois Huber (SVP), Christine Badertscher (Grüne), Franziska Roth (SP), and Priska Wimser-Felber (Mitte). The cross-party lineup made for a respectful and genuinely engaging exchange – proof that food systems are a topic that cuts across political divides.
Moderator Kilian Ziegler held the whole thing together with a deft mix of information, humor, and energy – connecting what was happening inside the container to the bigger picture outside it, and keeping the audience both entertained and informed throughout.
The day ended with an apéro that offered space for connection and, happily, some genuine community building within the Sufosec network itself.
On Tour: From Bern to Zürich
The Bundesplatz was just the beginning. After the launch, the container went on tour across Switzerland, making stops in Bern (BFH), Lucerne (Fastenaktion), Basel (Ernährungsforum Basel and Terre des Hommes), and Zürich (HEKS / REFINE) – each time in collaboration with local partners and open to the public free of charge.
The tour extended the reach of the event well beyond its opening day, bringing the escape game to new audiences in different cities and embedding it in local networks already engaged in food systems work.
Why It Mattered
The global food crisis is real, urgent, and deeply interconnected – which is precisely what makes it so hard to communicate. Escape Hunger offered something rare: a format that made people feel the complexity rather than just hear about it, and that created space for reflection, conversation, and action.
For Sufosec and its member organizations – including Skat Foundation – World Food Day 2025 was a reminder that how we communicate about food systems matters as much as what we say. Getting people into a container on a sunny square in Bern, handing them a puzzle about seed sovereignty, and watching them work it out together: that is also a form of advocacy.