Alternative proteins for food and feed

While facing climate change and natural resource scarcity, ensuring sufficient, nutritious, safe and affordable food to a fast growing world population with changing dietary habits becomes increasingly challenging. The protein supply is in this respect most critical, both for human consumption and animal feed. Integration of a variety of new or alternative protein sources from both terrestrial and aquatic origin into new and/or existing processes or products needs to be explored, in order to develop and ensure more sustainable, resilient supply chains, featuring high consumer acceptability by a clean labelling approach and attractive market opportunities.

Scope

Proposals shall identify and assess new or alternative protein sources for food and/or feed and develop/validate efficient production and processing approaches to convert/integrate them into high quality, safe, healthy, and sustainable products or ingredients. Proposals shall focus on the characterisation of nutritional values, functional and sensory properties of new and alternative proteins, as well as on the deepening of the understanding of protein-protein interactions for knowledge-based (re)formulations of protein blends that partly or fully could substitute traditional sources. To ensure complementarity with the activities of other projects and initiatives at the EU level, proposals could include one or more of the following sources, for food: plant-based proteins, micro-organisms, terrestrial non-chordate phyla, algae and plankton or sources not deploying natural resources; and for terrestrial and aquatic animal feed: algae, insects and other terrestrial non-chordate phyla, micro-organisms, plankton and possibly other sources whose production is not in direct competition with food production. Synergies in applications for both food and feed are encouraged, in particular for aspects linked to logistical and safety aspects of production and processing, as well as value chains. Activities shall comprise testing, demonstrating and/or piloting in a (near to) operational environment, as well as experimental production, all with a view to paving the way for subsequent commercialisation. When applicable, proposals should address requirements from relevant EU regulatory frameworks, including pre-market approval. Proposals may include limited research activities. Following the RRI principles, proposals will ensure that societal actors work together during the whole research and innovation process in order to better align both the process and its outcomes with the values, needs and expectations of society.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of the order of EUR 8 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Expected Impact

In the framework of SDG no 2, 9, 12, 13 and 15, The EU's Bioeconomy Strategy 2012 and the Food 2030 SWD, proposals should explain how the activities included will contribute to:

In the short run,

• Far-reaching progress in providing, processing and production of high quality proteins for food and/or feed from terrestrial and/or aquatic origin, moving available solutions from TRL 5 to TRL 6;
• New market opportunities for novel products, exclusively or partly derived from non-traditional proteins;
• Future-proofed protein supply chains based on the principles of diversity, sustainability and resilience;
• Increased trust and consumer acceptability for alternative protein sources and processes.

In the longer run, a sustainable food sector that significantly reduced its footprint in terms of land use, greenhouse gas emissions, energy, water and other relevant indicators.

Cross-cutting Priorities

• Socio-economic science and humanities
• RRI
• Blue Growth