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Content archived on 2024-06-16

Impeding neo-formed contaminants accumulation to reduce their health effects

Objective

Heat treatment of foods is a key process in the agro-food industry; it mainly results in the development of a large range of flavours and tastes through the Maillard reaction. However, some of these Maillard products called Neo-Formed Contaminants are currently suspected to have deleterious health effects. The recent discovery of neo-formed acrylamide in a variety of fried and baked foods has highlighted the fact that agro-food enterprises and especially SMEs are poorly prepared to face this emerging issue. Because of a lack of knowledge and inappropriate analytical and technological tools, SMEs are presently not able to control the impact of the different steps of the process on the NFC level.

In this context, the ICARE project is dedicated to:
- Reinforce the technological basis of the agro-food sector in order to understand and control NFC formation in industrial foodstuffs;
- Develop a rapid and cost-effective analytical method in order to enable SMEs to monitor the NFC level all along the production line
- Increase the knowledge base of SMEs by providing them a customized training
- Perform pre-normative research in order to provide EU regulatory authorities with a fast method for NFC quantification & a data base of NFC levels in food and their impact on health.

ICARE will provide European agro food SMEs with appropriate means to produce foods with reduced NFC rate and valorise such added-value products: guidelines of manufacturers' practices, alternative solutions to heat treatments, analytical methods to control the process and quantify the NFC levels, related training for lAGs and SMEs, clinical data and economical studies providing elements to implement a communication strategy toward consumers. The proposed 3-years project will bring together 5 European lAGs representing 9200 SMEs that will be highly responsible for the training and dissemination activities, 14 SMEs and 7 RTDs.

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Call for proposal

FP6-2003-SME-2
See other projects for this call

Coordinator

ASSOCIATION DE COORDINATION TECHNIQUE POUR L'INDUSTRIE AGROALIMENTAIRE
EU contribution
No data

Participants (28)