Towards resource efficient and safe food production and processing

With a booming global population and increasing demand for healthy and nutritious food, agriculture is racing to keep up with society's demands. To make better use of the resources allocated to food production and processing, we need to innovate agricultural and food processing technologies and to reduce food waste.

The EU-funded 'Resource efficient and safe food production and processing' (RESFOOD) project aims to overcome barriers to a resource-efficient food chain through a number of innovation interventions. These include new technologies to decrease resource use and minimise waste, and new methods to improve disinfection as well as health and safety monitoring in food processing.

Project partners have thus far focused on laboratory-scale experiments to develop new methods and technologies.

This project period has yielded a process to close water and nutrient cycles reducing water consumption in hydroponic systems by up to 40 %. In the area of food processing, researchers demonstrated a reduction in water use of 20 to 60 %.

Researchers also tested a number of decontamination technologies. Combined physical and chemical methods were shown to have no added benefits in microbial reduction in vegetables, so RESFOOD will now focus on new chemical treatments for sanitation of the water. A fast detection methodology has been successfully tested at laboratory scale.

In the second project period, RESFOOD will focus on validating these new processes through five case studies in food production and processing facilities. Once this process is complete, project partners will be in a position to implement new resource-efficient technologies in the food sector.