The agrifood sector is a strategic asset of all European Countries and is one of the largest and most strategic economic sectors, with particular social relevance: it is of crucial importance to ensure sufficient food, and vital to ensure employment, preserve rural public goods, supply healthy and quality products, including sustainable and secure production and distribution chains, and community building. It also has to facilitate the enhancement of the competitiveness and sustainability approach of Food Business Operators - especially SMEs - into the food chain, with quality, safety, and traceability being key elements. It is essential to consider all factors affecting food quality & safety, from raw materials to the environment of primary production, food processing and storage, logistics, retail, up to domestic procedures (from farm to fork), thus making health converge into a unicum as a system by applying the “One Health” approach, which integrates human, animal, and environmental health.
METROFOOD-RI is a distributed Research Infrastructure (RI) aimed at promoting scientific excellence in the field of food quality and safety. It provides high-quality metrology services in food and nutrition, comprising an important cross-section of highly interdisciplinary and interconnected fields throughout the food value chain, including agrifood, sustainable development, food safety, quality, traceability and authenticity, environmental safety, and human health. It combines a Physical-RI and an electronic-RI for open data deposition, access, and processing.
METROFOOD-EPI is the HEu funded project supporting the Early Phase Implementation of METROFOOD-RI; its overarching mission is to advance the building process of METROFOOD-RI as infrastructure consolidated for its full implementation and ensure an effective start of the operational phase. To this end, the following specific objectives were identified: support the establishment of the legal entity that will manage the RI; specify the technical implementation of the RI as service-oriented; consolidate the positioning in the landscape, as a research facility oriented towards end-users in the agrifood sector; secure the long-term sustainability of the RI.
