It is undeniable that protein is an indispensable part of the human diet, but the way we produce and consume it today presents many challenges, in terms of both global consumption patterns and their social, environmental and economic impacts. Providing a growing global population with healthy diets from sustainable food systems is therefore an immediate challenge. SMART PROTEIN aims to industrially validate and demonstrate innovative, cost-effective and resource-efficient, EU-produced, nutritious plant (fava bean, lentil, chickpea, quinoa) and microbial biomass proteins from edible fungi by up-cycling side streams from pasta (pasta residues), bread (bread crust) and beer (spent yeast and malting rootlets) industries. The alternative SMART protein will be used for the production of ingredients and products for direct human consumption, through developing future-proofed protein supply chains with a positive impact on bio-economy, environment, biodiversity, human nutrition, food and nutrition security and consumer trust and acceptance. These priorities will be addressed through global partnerships forged with consortium members from Europe, North America, Israel, Thailand and New Zealand to develop and demonstrate a climate-smart, sustainable protein-food system for a healthy Europe. We will harness plant and microbial protein knowledge to significantly enhance the sustainability and resilience of a new European protein supply chain, improve professional skills and competencies, and support the creation of new jobs in the food sector and bioeconomy.

"DiTECT will develop an integrated framework for real-time detection, assessment, and mitigation of biological, chemical and environmental contaminants throughout the food supply chain. Bringing together research, industrial and food authority partners representing the agro-food industry in the EU and China, DiTECT aspires to establish the foundation for future food safety monitoring platforms, through the development of a standards-based, modular, Big Data-enabled platform, capable of accurately predicting food safety parameters of a given food product based on data collected in real-time via cost-efficient sensors, at crop, grain storage, livestock and finally in the food supply, incorporating blockchain processes. DiTECT integrates multidisciplinary research teams from fields such as microbial and spectroscopic fingerprinting technologies; emerging ICT-based food tracing systems; signal analysis and data mining. Microbial profiling will be attained via conventional microbiological analyses in tandem with advanced molecular methods (e.g., NGS-based metagenomics), while spectroscopic profiling will be based on spectral data generated using appropriate rapid, non-invasive methods and sensor devices. DiTECT recognizes that current food-chains are lacking a complete snapshot view of food safety at the crop/livestock and finished product levels, and so foresees the development of a cloud-enabled storage system for all data corresponding to different insights of product-specific safety aspects, to be integrated into. The novel food safety services will be demonstrated in four (4) real-world Pilots with the active engagement of 21 EU and 13 CN partners, using real datasets to validate efficiency improvements. The carefully structured work plan embodies a “multi-actor” approach to prototype and validates a ready-for-take-up framework of significant exploitation potential for the agro-food industry."

Whey Permeate (WP) and De-lactosed Whey Permeate (DLP) are major side-streams of dairy processing and represent a key challenge for the dairy industry due to a lack of reliability in current disposal routes and represent a sustainability bottleneck for the expansion of milk production in Europe in the “post-milk-quota era”. AgriChemWhey will build a first-of-a-kind, industrial-scale biorefinery with integrated symbiotic industrial and agricultural value chains that will valorise over 25,000 tonnes (100% dry matter) per annum of excess WP and DLP to several added value products for growing global markets including lactic acid, polylactic acid, minerals for human nutrition and bio-based fertilisers. This will be achieved through a coordinated investment process and development path to realise the Flagship plant, representing the first major industrial venture to convert residues from food processing, as second generation feedstocks, to value added bio-based products. The Flagship will prove the techno-economic viability of the innovative WP/DLP-to-lactic acid biorefinery technology and will establish a new value chain for industrial symbiosis with other local actors for the production of high value sustainable food and feed (including high quality mushrooms) products from other side streams, as an enhanced circular bioeconomy approach to agriculture and agri-food waste. This offers society and industry the opportunity for greater resource efficiency - less food waste, more products from the same starting material (milk), and integration of food and non-food material production. AgriChemWhey will also develop a blueprint of an economic sustainability concept and replication plans for other regions across Europe, thus maximising both short and long term impacts, contributing towards the development of the European bioeconomy to promote rural growth, competitiveness and job creation, and aligning with European sustainability targets.

5G-SOLUTIONS is a 5G-PPP project supporting the EC’s 5G policy by implementing the last phase of the 5G cPPP roadmap. It aims to prove and validate that 5G provides prominent industry verticals with ubiquitous access to a wide range of forward-looking services with orders of magnitude of improvement over 4G, thus bringing the 5G vision closer to realisation. This will be achieved through conducting advanced field-trials of innovative use cases, directly involving end-users across five significant industry vertical domains: Factories of the Future, Smart Energy, Smart Cities, Smart Ports, Media & Entertainment. In particular, 5G-SOLUTIONS will provide: (a) validation of more than 140 KPIs for 20 innovative and heterogeneous use cases that require 5G performance capabilities and that are expected to have a high future commercialisation potential. These use cases will be field trialled separately as well as concurrently with real end-user actors through ICT-17’s 5G-EVE and 5G-VINNI facilities, thus validating their conformance to target 5G KPIs specified for each use case, as well as their business potential, ethical and social acceptance; (b) technological enablers for facilitating the execution of the field trials in an automated way, including (i) a unified cross-domain service orchestrator enabling multi-domain slicing and 5G service lifecycle automation, (ii) an innovative smart KPI visualisation system for facilitating the near real-time analysis, presentation, benchmarking and performance validation of reference 5G network KPIs against pre-defined target values, (iii) intent-based APIs for stimulating innovation and fostering the development, portability and provisioning of new innovative applications by SMEs. Our 26-partner consortium is driven by industry heavyweights from EU telecom and vertical industries and renowned research organisations, the majority of which participate in 24 out of the 43 5G-PPP projects and in several 5G-PPP Working Groups.

High-quality, safe, and sufficient drinking water is essential for life: we use it for drinking, food preparation and cleaning. Agriculture is the biggest source of pesticides and nitrate pollution in European fresh waters. The overarching objective of WATERPROTECT is to contribute to effective uptake and realisation of management practices and mitigation measures to protect drinking water resources. Therefore WATERPROTECT will create an integrative multi-actor participatory framework including innovative instruments that enable actors to monitor, to finance and to effectively implement management practices and measures for the protection of water sources. We propose seven case studies involving multiple actors in implementing good practices (land management, farming, product stewardship, point source pollution prevention) to ensure safe drinking water supply. The seven case studies cover different pedo-climatic conditions, different types of farming systems, different legal frameworks, larger and smaller water collection areas across the EU. In close cooperation with actors in the field in the case studies (farmers associations, local authorities, water producing companies, private water companies, consumer organisations) and other stakeholders (fertilizer and plant protection industry, environment agencies, nature conservation agencies, agricultural administrations) at local and EU level, WATERPROTECT will develop innovative water governance models investigating alternative pathways from focusing on the ‘costs of water treatment’ to ‘rewarding water quality delivering farming systems’. Water governance structures will be built upon cost-efficiency analysis related to mitigation and cost-benefit analysis for society, and will be supported by spatially explicit GIS analyses and predictive models that account for temporal and spatial scaling issues. The outcome will be improved participatory methods and public policy instruments to protect drinking water resources.