Flanders' FOOD

About the partnership

The partnership aims at:

• Development of an interregional partnership between agri-food actors (industries, academics, cluster organizations and relevant research and technology organizations (RTO’s))
• Facilitating the cross-over of innovation in the field of nutritional ingredients
• Stimulation of cross-sectoral collaboration
• Acceleration of the development and commercialization of novel and/or improved ingredients.

The partnership will build on an interregional database composed of multiple entries, in which consumer trends and habits over the globe as well as major market trends will be registered (first entry), allowing the partners of the partnership to identify subjects of interest for their core activities or for potential new business developments. After discussion and confirmation of new trends, business cases, or process/product developments, partners will define their intention of development of new ingredients/additives as a new project and will benefit from the “technology network” available in the database (second entry) in order to identify the existing pilot plants throughout partner regions. This will eventually lead to the identification of investment opportunities for economic actors as missing technology at pilot or industrial scale will be detected.

Altogether, this partnership will promote interregional collaboration between a diversity of partners and strengthen competitiveness of industries in their aim to better respond to specific consumer demands emerging from the market. This partnership thus offers the unique opportunity for interregional demand-driven innovation in the field of nutritional ingredients.

Focus and topics

The partnership will focus on five main challenges:

• To collect and interpret consumer demands and trends observed in the regional markets by strong and local cluster organizations, living labs, key opinion leaders and industry players (both B2C and B2B companies)
• To identify of the most promising innovative ingredients over Europe, taking economic, ecologic and social sustainability parameters into account
• To set up and elaborate the adequate innovation chain among the involved regions
• To build a strong technology network over Europe, to support the development of innovative ingredients for a selected category or functionality that has to be developed to respond to the detected consumer/market demands
• To set-up a database and its maintenance for efficient data management through the partnership

More information: see S3 site

Partners

Leading regions:

• Wallonia (BE)
• Flanders (BE)

Participating regions:

• Asturias (ES)
• Central Denmark (DK)
• Central Macedonia (EL)
• Emilia-Romagna (IT)
• Fejér (HU)
• Galicia (ES)
• La Rioja (ES)
• Region PACA (FR)