The vision of FutureFoodS is to collectively achieve environmentally-friendly, socially secure, fair and economically viable healthy and safe Food Systems (FS) for Europe. FutureFoodS gather 87 partners from 22 EU Member States, 6 Associated Countries and 1 third country. FutureFoodS includes public and private actors, policy makers, foundations, locally, sub-nationally, nationally, EU-widely. All these FutureFoodS partners are fully aligned on the vision for the Partnership and the methodology for its implementation in line with SDG17 and EU Green Deal components. This vision has been broken down into general (GO), specific (SO) and operational (OO) objectives applying across the 4 R&I areas and 4 transversal activities identified by the FutureFoods consortium in its stable draft Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) which constitutes the strategic backbone of the project. The four GO cover: GO1 - Functioning of FS; GO2 - System approaches; GO3 - Inclusive government; GO4 - Co-creation cases. These GO have then been translated into SO prioritised in line with the timescale and resources of the Partnership: SO1 - Change the way we eat; SO2- Change the way we process and supply food, SO3 - Change the way we connect with FSs and SO4 - Change the way we govern FS. In addition, 6 interconnected OO have been set: OO1- Pooling R&I resources and programming; OO2 - Operational FS Observatory; OO3 - Active FS knowledge Hub of FS Labs; OO4 - Functioning knowledge sharing and scaling mechanisms; OO5- Revisiting the SRIA; OO6 - Promoting, supporting, widening & gathering FS various communities. The objectives implemented in the 8 WPs of FutureFoodS will exert impact directly or indirectly in most of the destinations of Horizon Europe’s Cluster 6 2023-2024 work programme and particularly for the topic destination ‘Fair, healthy and environment-friendly FS from primary production to consumption’ echoing to the main EU and World FS policies & strategies.

METROFOOD-RI is a distributed research infrastructure (RI) that promotes scientific excellence in food quality and safety. It provides metrology services in food and nutrition across various highly interdisciplinary, interconnected fields along the food value chain, such as agrifood, sustainable development, food safety, quality, traceability and authenticity, environmental safety, and human health. In May 2022, it completed its preparatory phase upon the H2020 METROFOOD-PP project (GA871083). However, a few bottlenecks were identified in the final evaluation report; furthermore, the consortium prepared plans for the next short- and medium-term phases and the Board of Governmental representatives proposed several suggestions. METROFOOD-EPI was established with the overarching mission to build METROFOOD-RI as an infrastructure consolidated for its full implementation and to begin the operational phase, addressing any critical issues. Four specific objectives have been identified: support the establishment of the legal entity that will manage the RI, specify the technical implementation of the RI as service-oriented, consolidate its position in the landscape and secure long-term sustainability. METROFOOD-EPI will act on four layers, covering: ERIC set-up, including membership consolidation, governance establishment, securing funding, and distributed architecture; technical organisation and implementation of the RI for its operation, including a definition of user requirement specifications for the e-component and set-up of the core components, data management solutions, access, and services; consolidation of the RI’s positioning in the agrifood research & innovation landscape, including an update of the scientific strategy and contribution to the ERA, community building, and liaising with other complementary initiatives; long-term scientific & financial sustainability, including impact, risk management and user engagement.

METROFOOD-RI – Infrastructure for Promoting Metrology in Food and Nutrition - is a pan-European Research Infrastructure (RI) aimed to promote scientific excellence in the field of food quality and safety. It provides high-quality metrology services in food and nutrition, comprising an important cross-section of highly interdisciplinary and interconnected fields throughout the food value chain, including agrifood, sustainable development, food safety, quality, traceability and authenticity, environmental safety, and human health. METROFOOD-RI has been selected to the ESFRI Roadmap2018 as mature enough to be implemented within the next ten years. The Action is aimed to support METROFOOD-RI to grow from its current status (research-based network of facilities and skills) to a mature, centrally-coordinated, integrated RI, with the legal, financial and technical maturity required for implementing it. The main objective is to develop the organizational, operational and strategic framework of METROFOOD-RI. Activities include legal, governance, financial, technical, strategic and administrative aspects carried out in 15 work packages, organised in 3 blocks dedicated respectively to: the organisation of the legal entity that will manage the future RI, i.e. ERIC; define the operation and the operational standards at the level of the whole RI and for the National Nodes, as well as the role of the RI as service-oriented organisation; define the long term activities for the future RI and update the Strategic Research & Innovation Agenda, in response to the actual and future challenges in the agrifood sector and for the Society. The main outcome will be the establishment of legal and financial commitment for the future ERIC, ensuring long-term common commitment, decision-making and funding engagement. Continuous relations with stakeholders and the user community will be kept in order to ensure the addressing of their needs at the best, and to focus strategies and planned services

Sustain-a-bite has the ambition to develop innovative, affordable, energy and water efficient minimal processing solutions for plant-based ingredient and food production. The produced food prototypes will ensure maximal nutritional quality and health benefits, taking into account consumer perspectives. Our approach is to combine bioprocesses and non-thermal treatments that enable reduction of >30% energy and >50% water consumption, compared to highly processed plant-protein isolates. The technology concepts developed will reduce the consumer prices of plant-based foods by 25% compared to the commodity meat and dairy products making them more affordable. This novel co-(bio)processing concept will make a paradigm shift by disrupting the traditional plant ingredient processes, which generate substantial side-streams during production of highly refined isolates or concentrates. Sustain-a-bite food prototypes aim to diversify the use of plant ingredients in various forms, including liquids, semi-solids, and solids. This goes beyond addressing just the "protein challenge," as it utilizes the entire plant matrix to provide not only protein but also dietary fibre, essential minerals, antioxidants, and vitamins. This approach maximizes nutritional quality and offers associated health benefits. The minimal processing solutions developed in Sustain-a-bite will aim at tailoring the structural architecture of the raw materials towards reduced anti-nutritional factors, enhanced satiety, nutrient bio-accessibility, and sensory quality. We will evaluate the effect of processing on macro- and micronutrient bioavailability, protein, and starch digestibility as well as gut microbiome by developing improved realistic predictive in vitro models. Sustainability, health and economic impacts of minimal processing will be assessed both at the product and system scales.

This proposal systematically addresses the development, provision, and integration of services, across the European Research Infrastructures (RIs) landscape, that the scientific community can use to investigate the effects on health and the environment that artificial materials (including plastics, micro-, nano-, and biotechnological materials) can have. Exposure to such materials may occur as a result of their intended use (e.g., food packaging) or at the end of their lifecycle (e.g. plastic wear). These services, which are relevant to several areas of important societal and economic impact, are expected to span multiple scales and disciplines, including high-quality metrology, structural biology, microbiology, and ecotoxicology. The main output of this proposal will be a thorough overview of extant service offer by European RIs with respect to questions from state-of-the-art of scientific research in the aforementioned domains. FHERITALE will identify common strategies for the coordination and optimization of services at different RIs geared towards increasing the accessibility of relevant technologies. In parallel, it will identifty those service and technology gaps that are hampering high-impact research and preventing a timely assessment of the repercussions of new materials on health and the environment. These gaps constitute high-priority areas for future development. FHERITALE will design a coordination framework for the RIs to drive these key technological developments. The technological focus of this application includes emerging areas of research for which international interest is rapidly growing. The interdisciplinary nature of the cluster of identified technologies will connect health, food, and environment research, constituting one of the first examples of practical application of the “One Health” approach. This coordination effort will also serve as a fertile ground for further interdisciplinary research among RIs from the H&F and other domains.