IDfoods

Quality, safety and sustainability of agri-food production faces serious challenges across the world, motivated by natural resources scarcity, aggravated by the production and distribution system's own inefficiencies, climate changes, and the exponential growth of the world population. The IDfoods consortium, lead by Sonae and gathering 5 other enterprises and 5 non-enterprise entities from the national technology and scientific system, aims, with the development of this project, to contribute to a safer, healthier, more personalized, convenient, and sustainable nutrition, by working on 3 important axis: technological advances in primary production and transformation (encompassing an "Agri-food 4.0" concept), development of innovative food products, and other contributions for the sustainability of the agri-food value chain.

As such, these 3 axis address 3 global challenges related to: Sustainability, taking in to account the pressure felt on ecosystems and natural resources, brought by incorrect usage and lack of reutilization and revaluation; Food safety, given the need to ensure quality and safety for both food and new technologies; Food and health, in response to the increasing prevalence of pathologies and diseases pertaining to bad eating habits, mainly the ones related to the excessive daily consumption of salt, simple sugars and fats

The response to the aforementioned challenges, as advocated by this project, is given by gathering 7 strongly interlinked and complimentary subprojects, in which R&D activities are conducted, with the purpose of attaining innovative products possessing traits that will allow them to ensure a healthier and more convenient nutrition, which will enable the Portuguese agri-food value chain, and will also reduce and value food products that are approaching their end of life, in line with the principles of circular economy