Grain

Grain-based food products play a major part in the diets of European consumers. Many traditional foods are based on grain raw materials and play an important part of the cultural heritage of the European society. To assure the diversity of grain-based traditional food in European markets, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) must extend their skills in business development and production techniques.

The sub-network “Traditional Products of Grain” of TRAFOON aims at supporting SMEs that are producing traditional foods made of grains. In order to do so, TRAFOON interlinks researchers, knowledge transfer agents, and SME associations from the Netherlands, Slovenia, Poland, Ireland, France, Belgium and Germany to foster sustainable innovation transfer and entrepreneurship in the sector of traditional foods for the benefit of Europe.
Based on an inventory of needs in the first year, a range of training activities for SMEs and food researchers are developed:

• 8 training workshops in 5 European countries (France, the Netherlands, Ireland, Slovenia, Germany) will be performed including innovations in raw material production, food processing, food safety, certification, labelling, packaging, marketing and entrepreneurship
• An open access web-based Information-Shop will be established with all transferred innovations

These activities will increase the interaction of research and food SMEs to identify gaps of innovations, to develop future research projects and to collectively form a future strategic and innovation agenda for the European traditional food sector.