METROFOOD-RI | A common good to meet EU research goals and improve food production and consumption
ENEA and the Joint Research Unit METROFOOD-IT present METROFOOD-RI (“Infrastructure for promoting metrology in food and nutrition”), the first ESFRI Research Infrastructure coordinated by Italy for the domain “Health & Food”, designed to support research and develop concrete solutions and synergies in the area of food quality, safety and authenticity.
METROFOOD-RI Consortium includes 48 Partners from 18 European Countries, with more than 2200 researcher involved. In Italy, 12 among the main research institutions set up a devoted JRU and ENEA, which acts as coordinator, engaged several research units belonging to the different disciplinary fields.
Quality, safety, traceability and food authenticity, sustainability and nutrition are the keywords around which researches and studies focus, with the aim to promote measurement reliability and the adoption of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-usable) approach, favouring harmonisation and knowledge integration and sharing. (more details)
METROFOOD-RI is in the ESFRI Roadmap 2018 (Domain Health & Food)
METROFOOD-RI is one of the six new projects selected by ESFRI for the strategic potential and impact for strengthening European research, included in the new ESFRI Roadmap 2018. The fifth Strategy Report of the European Strategy Forum (ESFRI – www.esfri.eu) on Research Infrastructures (Roadmap 2018) has been presented by the ESFRI Chair Giorgio Rossi, on 11th September, in the framework of the Austrian Presidency events, at Aula der Wissenschaften in Vienna. ESFRI periodically selects proposals of RIs that become ESFRI Projects and have up to ten years to reach implementation, and identifies successfully implemented RIs in the class of ESFRI Landmarks. The ESFRI Roadmap currently includes 18 ESFRI projects and 37 ESFRI Landmarks grouped in six thematic domains: Energy, Environment, Health&Food, Physical Science and Engineering, and Social&Cultural Innovation and Digit.
ESFRI Roadmap 2018: roadmap2018.esfri.eu
What is METROFOOD-RI
The Infrastructure for promoting Metrology in Food and Nutrition (METROFOOD-RI) is a new distributed Research Infrastructure aimed to promote 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 agri-food, sustainable development, food safety, quality, traceability and authenticity, environmental safety, and human health. METROFOOD-RI consists of a physical infrastructure (P-RI) and an electronic infrastructure (e-RI) to coordinate and integrate existing networks of plants, laboratories, experimental fields/farms for crop production/animal breeding, small-scale plants for food processing and storage, kitchen-labs for food preparation. The e-RI will make available an access platform to share and integrate knowledge and data on metrological tools for food analysis, focusing on food composition, nutritional contents, levels of contaminants and markers.
