Widening Countries (WCs) such as Türkiye, Poland, Greece, Malta, North Macedonia are falling behind in the rapidly evolving Alternative Proteins (APros) sector, which is crucial for addressing global food security and climate change. Closing the skills gap in these regions is essential for ensuring competitiveness and driving sustainable food innovation. The APRISE project focuses on enhancing the capacities of diverse talents in these WCs, providing advanced training and promoting collaboration to strengthen the APros sector. By uniting 18 partners from academia, industry, and non-profit sectors, APRISE delivers a comprehensive approach to talent development. The project emphasizes interdisciplinary knowledge transfer, including technical training in APros production, sustainable practices, and consumer science, as well as professional skills such as policy advocacy, project management, and entrepreneurship. Through secondments and structured training programs, APRISE equips talents to address sector-specific challenges and contribute to sustainable growth. Additionally, APRISE offers a Return Plan to support reintegration into home institutions, ensuring that the skills and knowledge gained are applied to long-term career development. The project’s efforts will significantly increase the capacity of talents across WCs, enabling them to play key roles in the future of the APros sector and ensuring lasting impact in both research and innovation ecosystems.

Fostering Dairy competitiveness requires solid 3S based strategy for lifelong upskilling of employees, potential recruits and teachers to reduce talent shortages. The European Excellence in Dairy Learning project’s vision is collaboration between learning stakeholders in a sector with a strong vocational and work-based learning tradition. As the largest agri-food speciality, this requires close cooperation between the education, industry and world of science triad to meet the sector's vision of sustainable and technology-enabled growth and to overcome the perception of poor green credentials.Through a partnership and transnational approach, based on 40 years of collaboration, we aim to:•Ensure that dairy VET is at the forefront of innovative pedagogy, research, sustainable and technological development•Promote LifeLong Learning and CPD among teachers and dairy professionals•Create sustainable collaborative structures for synergy, cross-fertilisation and financial sustainabilityThe main outputs:•9 regional CoVEs embedded in regional 3S with close transnational cooperation.•1 Dairy Learning & Innovation Hub hosting a virtual learning platform with bespoke and innovative materials.•18 innovative internationally recognised dairy curricula closing skills gaps and driving growth and innovation•Feedback loops integrated in all CoVEs for relevance and quality of dairy education.•Blueprint for successful set-up of dairy CoVE•5 digital skills modules and 5 green skills modules both with innovative pedagogical methodologies.The main target groups are: 98 dairy teachers as change agents promoting lifelong learning and upskilling pathways; 540 dairy students as future professionals of an attractive sector with well defined career pathways; 27 educational institutions with updated, industry relevant curricula, training programmes and teaching material and upskilled teachers; 45 dairy companies having a greater pull of potential employees with the right skills

NMR-IMPROV proposes a radically new approach to investigating properties of dairy products by exploiting Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) relaxation, including Fast Field Cycling and Time-Domain NMR methods. The core of the concept is to acknowledge that macroscopic properties of dairy products are largely determined by dynamics of individual molecular fractions (from macromolecules to water) present in the system. Revealing and understanding the dynamics and arrangement of molecular fractions consisting dairy products is essential for providing a foremost guideline for designing products of required rheological properties and texture, avoiding effects such as aggregation or phase separation, and assessing authenticity of the products. The goal of NMR-IMPROV is to form an interdisciplinary and intersectoral network including physicists, chemists, mathematicians, food scientists and engineers and software and electronic engineers to develop NMR relaxation based means to gain knowledge on dynamical properties of dairy products on the molecular level. Relationships between NMR relaxation parameters and macroscopic properties of dairy products, investigated by conventional methods, will be established. The knowledge is meant to be exploited to address challenges of dairy technology associated with development and storage of products that are fermented, plant-based, personalized and manufactured from local raw goods. Moreover NMR-IMPROV aims at establishing NMR relaxation as a tool for evaluating quality and authenticity of dairy products. NMR-IMPROV builds a bridge between specialists from academia, with deep expertise in NMR relaxation, and food scientists and engineers for the ultimate goal of transferring NMR relaxation from academia to dairy industry. This is to be achieved by profiting from the synergy and transfer of knowledge between the parties involved and intensive training of young researchers and industry members.