FOODENGINE

FOODENGINE is a Marie Curie Innovative training network (ITN-ETN) for early-stage (ESR) researchers, funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Programme started on January 1, 2018. FOODENGINE offers a research training programme on the transformation of fruits, vegetables and legumes (FVL) in high-quality, sustainable, multi-functional ingredients and foods appealing to consumer preference, acceptance and need (PAN) profiles. The research training programme consists of two new ways of thinking: 1) An enginomics approach for food quality design connecting an 'omics' approach combined with chemometrics to instrumentally quantify quality changes of FVL-based food systems and an advanced engineering approach using multi-response kinetics to model quality changes during processing and storage; 2) Linking the enginomics-based instrumental food quality design with sensory properties, consumer acceptance and preferences to create new products appealing to consumers. The consortium of FOODENGINE combines the interdisciplinary expertise and infrastructure of three highly-ranked European Universities/Research institutes (KU Leuven (BE), FOOD-UCPH (DK), INRA (FR)), three large-turnover, multinational, R&D-based food (ingredient) companies (Döhler (DE), Cargill (BE), Unilever (NL)), two medium-sized food (ingredient) companies (GNT (DE), Greenyard Prepared (BE)) and an international market and consumer research company (Haystack (BE)) into a synergistic consortium to establish an international (BE, DK, FR, DE, NL), interdisciplinary and intersectoral pioneering European food training programme. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement N° 765415.