Multi-Actor Research and Innovation Approaches for Functional Food

Keeping up with the dramatic increase in world-food needs is a challenging task.

Food supply is further affected by the latest consumers’ dietary trends, driving demand for food products of enhanced nutritional value, defined health benefits, increased safety and proven environmental sustainability. RIA4FOOD will tackle these challenges by proposing a new framework for functional food design.

RIA4FOOD will utilise sea buckthorn berries as source of bioactive compounds, in conjunction with state-of-the-art methodologies from different disciplines, to showcase a scientifically-sound way of making food products functional and of proven added health value which can sustain nutritional needs of all consumer groups (healthy, diseased, obese, children, athletes, etc.).

Utilising human-relevant in vitro dietary and disease models and a complete metabolomic, epiproteomic and proteomic analysis, the project will assess the physiological pathways affected from sea buckthorn consumption.

These profiles will be then put under rigorous machine learning analysis, to produce algorithms that will calculate the correct amount of bioactive ingredients needed to confer the desired health benefits and will thus facilitate the design of new functional products.

More importantly, RIA4FOOD will also explore new technologies to deliver fresh sea buckthorn health benefits to the market as snacks of increased shelf-life.

For this the osmotic dehydration methodology will be put to the test: metabolomic, epiproteomic and proteomic profiles of osmotic sea buckthorn consumption will also be produced and compared to the respective profiles of the fresh fruit.

Finally, additional predictive algorithms will be computed, to provide effective feedbacks to both the primary farming sector and the processing sector, thus fostering the optimisation of the new proposed food value chain.