Dear Researchers, Students and Colleagues,
Food innovation represents an ongoing challenge for researchers, industry, policy makers, suppliers and food chain managers.
Consumers want good quality and tasty foods but are increasingly demanding nutritional and bio-functional properties for these foods, as more advanced research discoveries and facts are publicized.
Within this framework the ongoing research programmes carried out at European level, mainly supported by EU research funding or by national/regional research funds or by the food industry, are continuing at the highest scientific level by industrial and academic researchers. These activities include research on characterization, quality evaluation, and functionality of food and ingredients from both traditional and novel sources. Advanced and innovative technologies to improve food safety, maintaining food quality to prolong shelf-life, biotechnologies to increase nutrition and functional properties, highly efficient new analytical methods, new approaches to bio-packaging and food processing sustainability are all topics in which the main European research groups are actively involved, and having their research referred to.
Owing to the strong and increasing interest in the relationship between food consumption, public health, well-being, healthy ageing and more general aspects as sustainability and resource efficiency, developments in these food research areas have been included as a bio-based technology component of the Priority “Societal Challenges” platform within the EU’s Horizon 2020 vision documents.
In fact, an expectation of this future EU research programme is that substantive advancement will be needed for the achievement of the challenges and policy relevant indicators to “improving the lifelong health and wellbeing of all and to secure sufficient supplies of safe and high quality food and other bio-based products, by developing productive and resource-efficient primary production systems, fostering ecosystem services, alongside competitive and low carbon supply chains.”
Furthermore, the omics approach will allow food and nutrition to be considered as a whole, rather than as separate domains, to achieve the main objective, the optimization of human health and well-being.
The exchange of viewpoints and experiences between industrial and academic researchers and students will play a key role in creating the synergies needed to kick-start the development and innovation in the food science and food industry sectors following the recommendation to integrate organizations from universities, business and research in the “knowledge triangle” promoted by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology.
All the above topics will be the subject of plenary lectures, research papers and discussions at the next EFFoST Annual Meeting to be held in Bologna, Italy, from 12th-15th November, 2013.
The conference programme will be focused on two topic streams, one addressing bio-based scientific approaches for food-human wellbeing interaction, and the other relating more specifically to bio-based technologies for industry competitiveness.
On behalf of the Organizing and the Scientific Committee I’m very glad to invite all of you to participate in this conference since it will certainly be one of the key events for the European community of food scientists this year.
I sincerely hope you will be able to join us in Bologna to make your contribution to the progress of our multidisciplinary science by presenting your research as a poster or oral presentation.
Looking forward to welcoming you in Bologna.
Very best regards,
Marco Dalla Rosa - Conference Chair
Full Professor of Food Technology
Head of the Interdepartmental Centre for Agri-Food Industrial Research
Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna
