EIT Food

EIT Food

EIT Food is one of the Innovation Communities of the European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT) that contributes to the transition towards a circular economy. EIT Food is Europe’s leading food innovation initiative, aiming to make the food system more sustainable, healthy, and trusted by consumers.

The mission of EIT Food is to build an inclusive and innovative community that actively involves consumers. This mission is backed by six strategic objectives:

• Overcome low consumer trust
• Create consumer-valued food for healthier nutrition
• Build a consumer-centric connected food system
• Enhance sustainability through resource stewardship
• Educate to engage, innovate, and advance
• Catalyse food entrepreneurship

EIT Food employs different activities and offers various types of support to achieve its mission. Their activities can be categorised into four types:

• Innovation: creating and scaling-up agrifood start-ups to deliver new food innovations and businesses
• Education: developing talents and leaders to transform the food system
• Entrepreneurship: launching new innovative products and ingredients to deliver healthier and more sustainable food
• Public engagement: engaging the public so that they can become the agents of change in the food system

What is the relevance for Circular City initiatives?

Food (and biomass) is an important sector from a circular city perspective (read more on the role of circular cities in the food sector here). This specific community is focused on innovation and entrepreneurship in the food sector. In line with their strategic objective “Enhance sustainability through resource stewardship”, EIT Food is developing multidisciplinary approaches to encourage a circular bioeconomy mindset, which reuses by-products and waste, and increases the environmental sustainability of our food system. They have subsequently set up numerous projects to achieve this, whereby they focus on the following key areas:

• Tackling hotspots in the environmental footprint
• Increasing market penetrations of ingredients from sustainable, alternative sources
• Driving circular excellence

How to apply?

EIT Food provides different types of support. In addition to training, prizes and knowledge sharing, funding support is offered in the form of grants for innovative projects and a start-up programme for innovative start-ups (RisingFoodStars).

Calls for projects are not open consistently and, therefore, it is recommended to check the website regularly.

Research organisations, entrepreneurs, start-ups and SMEs are eligible for support from EIT Food. To be eligible to receive EIT funding, however, the fund-seeker must be an EIT Food partner. More information on how to become a partner can be found here .