Food Innovation and Diversification to Advance the Bioeconomy (FoodID)

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This award is funded by NSF Global Centers program, an innovative partnership with international funding agencies to jointly support use-inspired research addressing global challenges through the bioeconomy. This project is supported by NSF, the Research Council of Finland, and Business Finland. It supports U.S.-based and Finland-based researchers developing international partnerships and building multi-stakeholder engagement while further developing their project toward a global multinational effort.

The global food system is environmentally, economically, and socially unsustainable. Current practices contribute to significant greenhouse gas emissions and resource consumption. They incur hidden environmental, health, and poverty-related costs totaling US$20 trillion worldwide.

Importantly, they are insufficient for feeding a growing global population with one in three people suffering from hunger or malnutrition. These alarming outlooks demonstrate an urgent need for nutritious, environmentally and socially sustainable, and economically viable food production. This project - Food Innovation and Diversification to Advance the Bioeconomy (FoodID) - promote an international collaboration among investigators from academia and the industry notably in the United States and in Finland.

The vision of FoodID is to transform the future of food where innovative solutions drive a sustainable and resilient bioeconomy. The research focus is on alternative protein and lipid sources from specifically designed plants and microorganisms. FoodID also informs policymaking, enhances consumer understanding, drives economic development, and trains the next-generation workforce.

Partnerships with community colleges and minority-serving institutions provide notably training opportunities to students from underrepresented groups in STEM. Taken together, these efforts will improve global food security and create high-quality, sustainable, nutritious food ingredients that meet consumer needs.

FoodID is a transformative approach to advance knowledge of plant-based food systems. Leveraging biodiversity and biofoundry practices, FoodID drives innovation and discovery across four research thrusts: (1) a biofoundry approach for manipulation and production of food ingredients in plants and microbes; (2) sustainable biorefineries; (3) novel food design; and (4) environmental and socio-economic discovery.

FoodID uses the design-build-test-learn process to develop advanced plant and microbial platforms to produce complex biomolecules. This include using high throughput automated bioengineering and biofoundry approaches to develop and scale new crops and microbial strains. As a secondary focus, FoodID Leverages biodiversity to predictably control complex phenotypes in plants and microbes.

The goal is to develop novel ideotypes that direct carbon into high-value functional food components. Sustainable biorefineries, together with novel food design, optimizes the production and utilization of new ingredients, enhancing their functionality. Crosscutting these efforts is the development of new computing methods to improve bio-design, process development, and data management.

The team also develops an integrated sustainability assessment model to analyze environmental, social, and economic impacts of value chains. Through these approaches, FoodID serves as international innovation ecosystem driving sustainable food production.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.