EIT Food Business Plan 2023-2025

Project Information

EITFood BP23-25

Grant agreement ID: 101101912

DOI

10.3030/101101912

Project closed

EC signature date 13 April 2023

Start date 1 January 2023

End date 31 December 2025

Funded under

• The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT)

Total cost

€ 196 110 454,78

EU contribution

€ 196 110 454,78

Coordinated by

EIT FOOD
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EITFood BP23-25 (EIT Food Business Plan 2023-2025)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2024-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

As the world’s largest and most dynamic food innovation community, EIT Food (EF) accelerates innovation to build a future-fit food system that produces healthy and sustainable food for all. To achieve this, EF brings together the strengths of innovation, entrepreneurship and education across a diverse range of people and organisations representing the entire food value chain - from consumers and start-ups to universities and global corporations. Our plan builds on the strong industry, political and financial momentum the organization has created to take us and the partnership to the next stage in delivering long-term impact and ensuring that EF is financially sustainable for the future.

Its business plan 2023-2025 drives deep, systemic transformational impact through innovation to tackle key challenges facing the agrifood sector today, through four priorities:

Missions-driven approach: Aligning with EF three missions, Healthier Lives Through Food, A Net Zero Food System, Reducing Risk for a Fair & Resilient Food System. The plan directly addresses the complex and critical challenges of sustainability and climate change, non-communicable diseases and poor nutrition, and consumer trust, scarcity and transparency.

Designing for impact: Funding calls seek out innovations with the most potential for systemic change. Through a new partnership and community, they will bring together unique consortia who can accelerate innovation, speeding-up and scaling-up solutions to market.

Transforming partnership around purpose: the organisation’s transformed partnership has a depth of strategic expertise, a core of delivery capability which consistently brings innovation to market, and a broad community providing insight, energy and ideas.

Market-ready innovation: EF is creating an ecosystem to accelerate market-ready innovation, leveraging the pillars of knowledge triangle integration (Innovation, Education and Business creation, catalysed by Public Engagement) to create the foundations for the plan.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Through the first reporting period the organisation has worked towards achieving its 5 main objectives: diversifying funding sources and expanding commercial relationships, increasing the scope and effectiveness of our funding and activity footprint across our European hubs, operating globally as a network of networks to deliver on sustainability, health and circular economy targets and bring more innovations to market to benefit consumers and business.

EIT Food and its Affiliated Entities have secured a diverse set of projects funded via the Horizon Europe framework and other public and private funding schemes and used communication activities and events to present its portfolio to successfully build a sustainable innovation ecosystem. The teams have leveraged their expertise to increase citizen and consumer engagement, orchestrate innovation, foster business creation, and increase the organisation’s participation in educational programmes to encourage entrepreneurship. The RIS hub have driven the efforts to tailor EIT Food activities to the specific regional needs and dynamics. By providing targeted support in regions identified as modest and moderate innovators, RIS activities are boosting the ability of these regions to catalyse innovation. Specific actions to foster eentrepreneurship like Empowering Women in Agrifoof,Test Farms hor TeamUp to target deep-tech startups to accelerate commercializing viable technologies have contributed to these objectives. Its 3 flagship programmes (Seedbed Incubator, EIT Food Accelerator Network and RisingFoodStars) continue to bring innovations to the market. Over 100 start-ups have received support and no less than 40 start-ups have been created. In RIS countries, these efforts have resulted in 80 start-ups taking part in the different programmes and 20 new start-up created. The education area launched its accreditation system and has already 48 out of 50 programmes accredited.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The work carried out during this first reporting period has started to come to fruition setting th the building block for this business plan
Overall, 32 market innovations have reached the market in 2023 across all of our work areas, more than 100 start ups have been supported which will be yielding results in the next years. The work of business creation, with the introduction of Agrifood invest and other investment tools, will support high-performing companies, whose innovation activities are contributing to making the global food system more sustainable, healthy, and trusted. This new instrument will serve selected startups transition from a regional to a European and global scope. The introduction of the EF labelling to non-degree education has been received with great interest from the community which sees this as a unique opportunity in the delivery of entrepreneurial skills. Moreover The new Deep Tech initiative has set the fundament for training 18,000 youth in AI and entrepreneurship in the next two years. Finally, the recent launch of The Consumer Observatory together with the existing programmes (FoodUnfolded and FoodEducators) and the Proof of Concepts (PoCs) will help EF gather consumer insights, change the public discourse around food and sustainability empowering citizens to make better choices, influence food system policies and business practices