FOODNUTRI: investment project

Need:

The food environment is undergoing rapid changes due to the need moving to ecologically sustainable food production to produce nutritious, safe and healthy food in accordance with its principles. Succesfull development of new products requires both high-quality food nutrition research and efficient product development, both of which rely on measurement techniques in activities that evaluate for example products’ quality, composition and health effects. A key aspect in assessing these effects are measurement techniques that can provide molecular level information on food and human matrices and address and conclude the safety and health effects of the new food products, and provide molecular level information on the dynamics of the food and its interactions with the gut and gut microbiome. The expertise and techniques for this are not commonly available to the stakeholders of the foodsector in Northern-Savo due to associated cost, but the benefits of making such information available to supporting the development and health assessment are obvious. The added value has the potential to bringing a competitive edge to the associated projects.

Aims:

This investment project belongs to the FOODNUTRI development project and its goals are 1) to strengthen the operation of the national FOODNUTRI infrastructure and strengthen the competitiveness of the food cluster in Northern-Savo by developing and making available stateof-the-art measurement technologies and expert competence to support product development, health effects assessment and sales, and 2) to create new opportunities for co-operation of the public sector, companies and universities.

Solutions:

In the investment project, we will invest in advanced measurement technology and specialist expertise, as well as develop methods that serve the stakeholders of the FOODNUTRI development project and the -infrastructure. With the help of these methods, we can study e.g. how new plant protein products and novel foods affect the composition and function of the intestinal microbiota and thus also human health. The measurement techniques will also play a key role in the accurate analysis of the selected biomarkers and also in the analytics of new, previously unknown but relevant to health and nutrition, molecules that support the R&D activities of the stakeholders of the FOODNUTRI development project. We will also define a service model for the technology, which guarantees its availability as part of the open research and development platform and thus guarantees the availability of the service in the future as well.

Results and effectiveness – regional effects:

The project makes available technologically advanced measurement methods and expert competence in Northern-Savo, focusing especially on the co-operation parties operating in the food sector. In general, the technologies and expert knowledge in question have only been available to a few and the largest players in the field, and thus their use in R&D-operations has been limited. With the help of this investment project, we will make the technology and competence available to target groups as part of the FOODNUTRI development project and -infrastructure and, thus, support and promote the research and development of innovative, sustainable produced food products in Northern-Savo.