The SHEALTHY project proposal has been designed following the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) guidelines of the EC. By engaging with multiple actors (local food producing & processing micro and SMEs, food research community, technology providers, business managers, logistics operators, food and consumers’ associations) the SHEALTHY project will:

– Develop, optimise and combine mild technologies to preserve freshness and improve safety and nutritional value of minimally processed F&V and juices and smoothies.

– Design and develop innovative BMs and novel logistics systems (including authenticity and traceability system) that will support traditional micro & SMEs to adopt novel technologies..

– Validate the resulting prototypes (both in terms of technologies and BMs) in local and regional food SMEs, including assessing their environmental impacts and economic feasibility.

– Transfer knowledge and tools to other regional and local food companies sharing the project benefits, results and best practices to increase competitiveness and jobs around EU.

Specifically:

Objective 1: To optimise a combination of non-thermal technologies to improve the safety and quality of minimally processed F&V and F&V based juices and smoothies

Objective 2: To improve the sustainably of minimally processed F&V and F&V based juices and smoothies by extraction of bioactive compounds from fruit and vegetables coproducts & by-products and co-products have been selected and a list of marker compounds in F&V by-products and co-products has been identified.

Objective 3: To define new sustainable holistic and collaborative business models (BMs) to increase the competitiveness of local and regional food producing & processing SMEs

Objective 4: To develop new digitalised logistic systems for the traceability of the whole food chain, including new innovative tools for real time tracking of food freshness, authenticity and supply chain strategies

Objective 5: Down-scaled processing technologies tailored to the needs of SMEs, the specificities of products and markets and supply chains

Objective 6: To exhaustively study the impacts of the combined mild technologies on the food compositional properties, sensory quality and safety, including analysis of consumer perception

Objective 7: To demonstrate the environmental & economic sustainability of the project processes

Objective 8: To maximise the innovation impacts of the project for contributing to the uptake of the project results for growth and jobs and replicate the results beyond the project boundaries