GIANT LEAPS joins the Horizon4Proteins Cluster

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. 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. 

Sharing this goal, the four projects have been working together on key aspects such as consumer acceptance of alternative proteins, safety and regulatory challenges, food applications, and sustainability.

GIANT LEAPS, LIKE-A-PRO and VALPRO Path’s involvement will ensure the continuity of the Horizon4Protein initiative and, through this collaboration, both projects will support the EU transition towards a more sustainable and resilient food system.

We are excited to join this collaboration and join forces to support the EU transition towards a more sustainable and resilient food system!

Watch this video to learn more about Horizon4Protein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzmnWAQh2Fg&t=2s

About LIKE-A-PRO: From niche to mainstream - alternative proteins for everybody and everywhere

The interest of Europeans in alternative proteins is becoming clear and this trend is the perfect ground for the dietary shift towards sustainable and healthy nutrition and food systems, in line with the ambitions of the EU Green Deal, Farm to Fork strategy and EU’s climate goals. Yet, this interest is not reflected in the European dietary patterns, as alternative proteins are mainly consumed by early adopters, while the majority is less receptive towards alternatives or have limited possibilities to integrate them in the diets. This gap between interest and consumption is due to obstacles in the food environments such as product limited offering, suboptimal product taste, isolated product placement in shops or menus etc. Without overcoming these obstacles, alternative proteins will remain a niche.
LIKE-A-PRO aims at mainstreaming alternative proteins, making them accessible, available, and acceptable to everybody (from children to elderly, vulnerable groups) and everywhere (across Europe, in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas). To achieve this, key representatives along the entire alternative protein value chain (growers, producers, cooks, retailers, consumers, researchers) will work together in a trans-disciplinary consortium.
To improve European food environments towards fostering alternative protein consumption, practical solutions will be co-designed with citizens. This social innovation will take place in 11 living labs and in 4 real life food environments. For a diversified alternative protein offering, 16 new alternative protein products will be developed with 7 sustainable, healthy, and novel sources. To secure result deployment, the project will actively involve middle food system actors (+35,000 companies) – via co-creation and capacity building. For a maximised impact, innovative communication campaigns will be launched in 6 countries, reaching 8 M citizens in 4 years.

LIKE-A-PRO project has received funding from the European Union’s HORIZON EUROPE research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 101083961.

About VALPRO Path: Circularity for food system success - enhancing plant proteins of tomorrow

As the European Union heavily depends on imported plant protein for food and livestock feed, the VALPRO Path project recognizes the urgency to build a self-sustainable Europe. With a focus on harnessing plant protein production, this transformative initiative aims to facilitate a seamless transition from traditional practices to innovative approaches.

In order to create value for all food-chain actors and enhance plant protein production in Europe, VALPRO Path will launch five large-scale pilots (Innovative Production Systems) in Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Denmark. Covering 5 pedo-climatic areas and protein crops with the highest value potential like pea, lupin, chickpea, faba bean and lentils, VALPRO Path will ensure sustainable growth of protein crops through variety selection of nutritionally best plant- protein sources and their combinations.

VALPRO Path has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101059824.