Kick-Off Meeting of FoodPackLab in Barcelona

At the end of July 2018, the official kick-off meeting of the FoodPackLab project took place in Barcelona at the clusters space of secpho, coordinator of the FoodPackLab programme. Five European clusters of photonics, packaging and food industry have come together to promote intersectoral cooperation and provide innovative solutions for food waste in the Packaging industry.

The FoodPackLab project, funded by the COSME program of the European Commission, is the result of a strategic partnership of 5 clusters joining different activities, industries and countries. It focuses on the intersectoral cooperation to reach internationalization, offering time and space to different stakeholders in order to work on innovative solutions for one of the most important challenges facing our contemporary society: food security.

The 5 clusters involved in the project are: secpho cluster of photonics in Spain, Optics Valley cluster of photonics in France, Food Processing Innitiative and foodRegio of the food sector in Germany and Packaging Cluster of the sector of Catalan Packaging.

This project aims to innovate the packaging sector in the food industry with the help of photonic technologies. The idea is to benefit from all possible technologies to improve the packaging in the food sector, to understand the status of the current market and then see what opportunities we can find outside Europe based on this concept.

Within the framework of this project, we want to set up different meetings with the companies to see where they are, what their ambitions are and try to find synergies between these 3 sectors to get innovative products in the market.

This first session served to understand the different points of view of the project, to share what the purposes are, define common goals and assess what are the next steps to follow. In addition, it helped to see the different problems and positions of the different sectors in the technologies and the way they are applied. Thus it was obvious that all available knowledge provided by the companies of the involved sectors is useful in order to reach the best project outcome.