Fresh food on a trip to Mars is a hard ask. Chinyere “Chichi” Ukeje, a 25-year-old African American woman from Philadelphia, has just won NASA’s $300,000 top prize for a design aimed at doing exactly that.
Her concept, Adaptive Nourishment Infrastructure, or ANI, won NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge: Mars to Table competition. The contest focused on how astronauts could eat fresh and nutritious meals during long missions when they cannot depend on food shipped from Earth.
A Mars mission could last many months, making it impractical to carry enough prepackaged food for an entire crew. NASA asked participants to develop complete food systems that could produce, prepare and recycle resources in space.
NASA launched Mars to Table in January 2026 as a follow-up to the Deep Space Food Challenge, which ran from 2014 to 2021 in partnership with the Canadian Space Agency. The latest competition drew 113 submissions from teams in 28 U.S. states and 33 countries.
NASA awarded a total of $650,000 to five winning teams, with Ukeje receiving the largest prize.
According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, ANI combines several methods of food production instead of relying on a single source. It includes controlled-environment agriculture, fermentation, fungi cultivation and nutrient recycling through bioreactors.
The system would still use some supplies brought from Earth, but its goal is to produce about half of the food needed by astronauts away from Earth. NASA designed the challenge around supporting a crew of 15 for 500 Martian sols, or roughly 513 Earth days.
Ukeje’s proposal also addresses how astronauts would eat the food after growing and processing it. It includes nutritious food cubes that astronauts could heat using portable electric lunch boxes and turn into familiar meals, including tacos and pasta.
For Ukeje, familiar meals are part of making life in space more manageable during a mission that could leave astronauts millions of miles from home.
Ukeje has family roots in Nigeria and the Igbo community. She named ANI after Ani, a Nigerian Earth goddess associated with harvest and fertility.
She spent most of her childhood in Maryland and attended high school in Nigeria before returning to the United States. She later earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and is pursuing a master’s degree in computer science at Johns Hopkins University.
She plans to use part of her NASA prize money for additional research into food technology. NASA has not said ANI will be directly used on a future Mars mission.
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