The Pact for Skill roundtable raised several issues the Agrifood secThe Pact for Skill roundtable raised several issues the Agrifood sector is facing and identified potential ways of overcoming them: upskilling and reskilling workers; intersectoral skill transfers; increased attractiveness of the sector to youth; digital transition; partnerships between learning institutions and companies.The I-RESTART project aims at reskilling and upskilling the workforce in the agrifood and veterinary sectors, retrain the employees leaving the heavy industry to hire them in the agrifood sector, and engage some students that want to enter the agrifood labor market, to improve their digital skills and facilitate the transition to the Green Deal initiative.To reach the above-mentioned objectives, I-RESTART will facilitate the inter-sectoral and intergenerational skills transfers through the adoption of an innovative micro-credentials methodology and the work-based learning experiences that will provide inclusive, flexible and engaging work-based patterns with mentors while opening the ecosystem also to external workers.The project, complementing the FIELDS Blueprint on agriculture and forestry, will provide the tools to tackle future challenges with the offering of 10 occupational profiles for a total of 3200 hours of training. In total 16 trainers and 200 trainees will benefit from the pilot training, and 40 students will complete the work-based learning scheme that also includes the advanced entrepreneurial skills.The 29 partners consortium from 11 countries will identify skills needed and gaps, create occupational profiles, detailed curricula, design European strategies and 10 country roadmaps to reflect the country's needs while keeping EU quality standards (ESCO, EQAVET) to address the mobility of learners through Europe.A strong connection will be established with the Pact for Skills initiative, in order to make useful content for the members that will implement the pact.

Food business is the first sector in terms of employment in Europe, 90% of food companies being SMEs (majority of them being micro enterprises). Though innovation is the main leverage to improve competitiveness, there is neither high enough innovation and entrepreneurship spirit nor innovation transfer from High Education Institutes (HEI) to business. The partners of this consortium, involved for years in initiatives aiming at fostering innovation and interactions between students and industry on the basis of project-based learning approach, identified limits of the current training approaches. The project performance will be notably assessed against the generation of new products or processes and the creation of value and long term collaborations. For this purpose, it will create a European FoodBusiness Transfer Laboratory that will centralize new educational content and tools to foster stimulate entrepreneurship entrepreneurial skills and will allow constructive interactions between HEIs and foodbusiness stakeholders. Supported by a shared web-platform allowing multidisciplinary knowledge exchanges between the partners, this project will also produce best practices for entrepreneurship development, new learning and teaching approaches in closer contact with industry, etc. Taken together, FOODLAB project’s results will homogenize educational approaches; improve interactions between academia and industry; develop entrepreneurship spirit; foster innovation and competences transfer; promote integration of young graduated in SMEs. Ultimately this project will be the basis of competitiveness improvement in food SMEs and bigger companies. It will also help to maintain and increase employment in food sector and possibly in other sectors, as the present project is designed to allow transfer of methodology and best practices in training to other sectors.

The “Enhancing Sales Capacity for Agri-food Products in Europe” (ESCAPE) project aims at developing and implementing aninnovative blended learning methodology to train food technology students in sales techniques.Most graduates with Master’s degrees in business are highly skilled in sales, but very often lack technical knowledge in food areas.On the other hand, Food Science programmes mostly train their graduates on technical issues, but do not provide training on salesskills. There is therefore a shortage of candidates with this highly prized dual competence. Some multinational food companiesrecognize this need and have developed graduate programmes which include training in sales techniques. However, SMEs, whichmake up the vast majority of EU food companies, are unable to develop and implement these kinds of training programmes.Against this backdrop, the main objective of the ESCAPE project is to develop an innovative training tool for food technologystudents motivated to work in sales services, in order to cater to the F&D industry needs, i.e. effective international salespersons withskills in food technology. Partners will collaborate to create an e-learning platform in English for use in a flipped classroom mode ofinstruction. It consists of a blended learning approach that moves lectures, content and activities to an online learning environmentfor individual study, followed by face-to-face active learning. The training materials will be complemented with face-to-facecollaboration and coaching activities, based on “real-world” needs and problems, during the SIAL2018 food fair.To reach its objectives, the ESCAPE project brings together 6 partners from 3 EU Member States (France, Italy and the Netherlands).The project is coordinated by Association Nationale des Industries Alimentaires (ANIA). ANIA chairs the French National TechnologyPlatform, Food For Life France, commissioned by the European Commission, which serves as a unique meeting place for foodcompanies, Ministries, Universities, Research Institutions, Clusters and Financing entities, across the food chain. Because of itsstrategic position and reputation in Europe, ANIA will be able to widely promote the ESCAPE training tool throughout Europe. ANIAwill benefit from the collaboration of two other national federations: Federalimentare in Italy and TKI Agri&Food in the Netherlands.Three HEIs delivering Master’s degrees in food science will also participate in the project: ISARA in France, Università degliStudi di Torino (UNITO) in Italy and Wageningen University in the Netherlands. These 3 leading European HEIs will develop thetraining content and support.To reach the project objectives, partners will implement a precise methodology, replicable by any interested HEI and transferable toother industrial sectors. The first step will be the definition of the specifications of the training, based on the needs of foodcompanies. All the partners will participate in this activity, which will aim at fostering cooperation between HEIs and companies. HEIswill develop the training content in English, and adapt it to the pedagogical objectives of each HEI and country. UNITO will beresponsible for the development of the platform on which the training content will be uploaded after validation by all the partners.The experimentation phase will target 20 students in each HEI. They will also have the opportunity to be coached by sales managersfrom the food sector. An analysis of the experimentation phase will be carried out so as to improve the e-learning platform ifneeded. The project will implement a wide dissemination campaign all along its lifetime. Partners will define a preciseexploitation plan in order to replicate the training in other European HEIs.The ESCAPE project should result in the development of several outputs that will have an important short-term impact:- Theoretical training ending with attractive practical training during the SIAL food fair: during 5 days, the students will be taught byfood sales professionals and will have the opportunity to exchange with them via coaching activities. This will improve the qualityand the effectiveness of the training, and lead to better student employability- A collection of reusable educational materials available in an open repository for educational and other institutions to use in theirprogrammes- A continuing education resource expandable to any working professional in related areas- A communication programme to engage other European institutionsThe ESCAPE consortium aims at providing the 28 EU MS with a suitable and relevant tool to help the European F&D industry recruitqualified professionals to sell food products on national and international markets. The ESCAPE methodology and platform will beeasily transferable to any European HEI and will improve the qualifications F&D professionals, a key factor in boosting thecompetitiveness of the sector.

The cold chain permits to process and commercialise in good conditions of quality and safety a wide range of foods. However the cold chain represents high energy consumption. OPTICOLD objective is to increase sustainability of the cold chain by optimising the compromise between energy consumption, safety, quality and shelf life for refrigerated processed foods. Cold chain is currently managed to respect target temperatures, determined by regulation and specifications agreed among stake-holders. OPTICOLD project proposes a new approach, aiming at a multi-criteria management of the cold chain, with a main role for minimisation of energy consumption. To meet this objective, OPTICOLD project will build a global model of the cold chain, by linking energy consumption with variables that determine food shelf life: its microbiological safety and its quality. This type of model does not exist at the moment for the whole cold chain. It will be established using the relations linking all these variables, energy consumption, safety and quality, to the temperatures of the cold chain. In particular cold in the food processing plant, for which scientific knowledge is lacking, but for which empirical professional knowledge indicates a high potential to save energy, will be studied in priority. A management of cold chain based in priority on energy consumption will permit to reduce energy consumption, but it may results in cold temperatures distribution more prone to deteriorate quality and safety (the variables determining shelf life). It is therefore necessary to develop multicriteria approaches to determine the margins of action on temperature distributions, or “acceptable variations for cold temperatures”, considering the requirements for quality and safety. This implies the most accurate prediction of safety and quality as a function of cold temperatures. A the moment, relations between food safety or quality and cold temperatures are described with important uncertainties, which imply important margins of safety on the temperature regimes of the cold chain, and therefore over-spending of energy. OPTICOLD will therefore integrate to the studies on energy consumption, researches on the physiology of cold adaptation in bacteria and researches in bio-physic on plant tissues destructuration, as the cause of non-microbiological spoilage of raw plant foods. In an optimised cold chain, the relation built in the project between energy cost and the shelf-life variables will permit to quantify the gain in energy consumption reduction with the consecutive loss in shelf-life, for all the steps of the chain. Then the steps for which the most important gain in energy consumption can be obtained for the least loss in shelf life will be identified. The approach of the OPTICOLD project will be developed on processed, refrigerated foods. Three food categories will be studies, to cover very different conditions to impart a generic dimension to the project: living food with a physiological activity which spoilage is mostly not microbiological (fresh cut salads), dead and raw food (fresh pastry dough), pasteurized chilled food (fresh pasteurized pasta). The possibilities to generalize the OPTICOLD approach developed on these three food categories to other types of foods will be studied.

The ENOUGH project will provide technologies, tools and methods to contribute to the EU Farm to Fork strategy to achieve climate neutral food businesses. The ENOUGH project will identify how the food industry can 1. Reduce GHG-emissions by at least 55% by 2030 compared with 1990 levels. 2. Achieve climate neutrality for food businesses by reducing energy use and increasing energy efficiency by 2050. 3. Improve the overall integrated sustainability of food systems (including social/health, climate/environmental and economic aspects) whilst at the same time meeting societal goals. 4. Increase awareness among policy makers, businesses, investors, entrepreneurs, institutions, stakeholders and citizens of selected innovative systemic solutions and their potential for uptake at EU scale. The project brings together 30 partners from 9 EU nations, Norway, Turkey and the UK, who have in depth expertise across the whole food chain (refrigeration, cooking, baking, drying). The ENOUGH project is constructed around 11 work packages (WP): WP1 will identify 1990 and 2020 baselines for GHG emissions and will then forecast how emissions will change moving forward to 2030 and 2050. In WP2, we will identify what are the energy efficient measures and new technologies that are vital to achieve the maximum reductions in emissions. In WP4 we will use all the information and models from WP1 and 2 to develop a web-based tool that will identify the benefits of thermal integration heating and cooling and provide information on potential global emission reductions across the whole food chain. In WP5, data from food process and the food supply chain will be used to optimize and better control operations and technologies to minimize emissions. In WP3 and 7 we will examine how social behaviour, policy and finance can add to the GHG reductions target. In WP6, the more relevant and promising technologies will be demonstrated. A set of the most promising technologies TRL (5-7) have been pre-selected for demonstration based on their relevance and readiness. Additional technologies/operational adaptations will be added during the project and will be selected using a robust process managed by the coordinator and demonstrated in real life. Work from the ENOUGH project will be widely disseminated with an ambitious communication plan in WP8. WP9 includes all project management. WP10 oversees the ethics compliance of the project and WP11 includes communication with European Commission.