Horizon Europe Sequr Food Project: Scientific exchange to assess the quality and risks of food obtained through new processing and packaging technologies.
- Type Project
- Status Firmado
- Execution 2025 -2028
- Assigned Budget 1.656.000,00 €
- Scope Europeo
- Main source of financing Horizonte
- Project website Proyecto SEQUR FOOD
Consumers are looking for safe, nutritious, long-lasting, and environmentally friendly foods. However, traditional processing methods can reduce nutritional quality or use additives that some consumers prefer to avoid. New technologies are needed to balance safety, nutrition, and sustainability.
With support from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions program, the SEQUR FOOD project is creating a global network of researchers from Europe and South America to develop advanced food processing methods. Using techniques such as UV treatment, cold plasma, and bioactive packaging, SEQUR FOOD aims to make food safer and more shelf-stable. It will also evaluate these methods for health benefits, focusing on popular foods such as blueberries and oat milk.
The objective of SEQUR FOOD is to build an international scientific network including researchers from the EU and South America who will work on the development of new food processing technologies (i.e. UV treatment, cold plasma processing, nanoemulsification, freeze-drying concentration) and/or active bioactive packaging (i.e. bacterial cellulose, antibacterial paper, etc.) to obtain safe products for the EU market with extended shelf-life and high nutritional and functional properties. This includes the optimization of new food processing technologies, the nutritional and risk assessment of these technologies and the obtained products as novel foods within the EFSA framework, and the documentation of their health claims, where applicable.
To achieve this goal, a consortium of 5 EU universities (Greece, Poland, Romania and Spain) with expertise in all aspects of EU risk assessment, 1 plant-based processing company based in Poland together with 1 university and 1 research institute from South America (Colombia) with extensive experience in novel food processing techniques will work on a variety of case studies spread across several novel food processing technologies and products relevant to Colombia: fruit (passion fruit, cape gooseberry (Physalis peruviana L.), blueberries); cold-brewed coffee; oat milk (including oat grains and nuts needed for its production); and high oleic palm oil versus olive oil.
These case studies will serve as proof of concept for the holistic evaluation of each technology-food pair and will constitute the basis for future research, but also for food processors, the main stakeholders in the project. The activities proposed in SEQUR FOOD are innovative in many respects. The most important innovation is the holistic approach to the development of new food products in terms of comprehensive physicochemical, microbiological, nutritional, and functional properties, as well as sensory evaluation and multicultural consumer acceptance.
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