COST Action CA24145
About Us
The food industry still relies on trial-and-error product development, which is too slow to meet urgent needs for sustainable, affordable, healthy and biodiversity-friendly foods. Each company or research group uses its own methods to assess techno-functional properties like solubility, foaming, gelling and emulsifying, leading to inconsistent data, which is non-reusable for predictive modelling purposes. The lack of standardised methods and shared databases prevents the creation of predictive models that could accelerate product innovation. Although other fields have been transformed by data science and AI revolutions, food science lags behind, mainly due to poor data comparability, missing metadata, and limited accessibility. Community building around harmonised methods and data sharing is missing, which is essential for long-term success in food development and impact.
The INternational FOod TECHno-functionality – DATA project (INFOTECH-DATA) aims to lay the foundation for the development of techno-functionality prediction, which will facilitate accelerated food product development. INFOTECH-DATA will achieve this by creating comparable, accessible, and reusable techno-functionality data through: 1) method standardisation and 2) open-access database capabilities built with the entire European (and in the long-term global) food science community. INFOTECH-DATA will build a community to support the collection and sharing of comparable, reusable techno-functional data on food ingredients.
INFOTECH-DATA
will achieve the main goal via four sub-goals
Standardisation of methods
Identify key techno-functionalities of food ingredients (e.g., solubility, gelation, emulsifying, foaming) that need harmonisation. Develop simple yet robust, accurate standard methods applicable across academia and industry. Validate these methods through large-scale international ring trials.
Data infrastructure and management
Develop metadata standards to capture essential variables. Build a FAIR open-access database for techno-functionality data. Design user-friendly workflows for data entry, storage and re-use.
Community and capacity building
Form a global network connecting food scientists, data scientists, and industry to support the development of methodologies and the collection and sharing of data. Empower Young Researchers and Innovators (YRIs) via training programmes and mobility grants
Long-term strategy and impact
Develop a strategic roadmap to maintain and expand the INFOTECH-DATA methodologies beyond the Action. Build links with existing infrastructures, platforms and initiatives. Identify research gaps and turn them into EU-level research proposals and projects.
Expected outcomes:
- Consensus on validated methods, terminology and metadata for techno-functionality analysis, which will be published in a series of open-access articles.
- A shared, open-access database enabling data sharing, and in the long-term data science approaches and predictive modelling.
- A self-sustaining global community supporting the standardised methods, data collection and data sharing.