NEW EU PROJECT: CHANCE

Tuesday, 12 April 2011 07:41

CHANCE “Low cost technologies and traditional ingredients for the production of affordable, nutritionally correct foods improving health in population groups at risk of poverty” intends to adopt a new multidisciplinary approach, leading to nutritional strategies for the prevention of malnutrition in population groups at risk of poverty (ROP) which includes 79 million EU-27 citizens according to 2007 Eurostat statistics.

These European subclusters and ethnic populations have in common low purchasing power, limited education and the highest risk of diet-related diseases due to sub-optimal nutrition. The synergic collaboration of nutritionists, food chemists, economists and technologists in CHANCE allow a robust strategy to by pass all barriers to healthy nutrition by the lab-scale development of affordable but nutritionally rich food products, new packaging and portioning.

VTT is one of the research partners in the project among other 16 partners across Europe. VTT contributes to CHANCE project in several areas: Identification of populations at risk of poverty, Collecting and analyzing nutritional data, Food product and packaging development, Processing scale up and technology optimization and Technology transfer and test of production.

The scientific objective of CHANCE project is to deepen the understanding of nutritional criticalities and barriers to healthy food choices specifically related to population groups at ROP and to evaluate the actual impact of the evidenced nutritional criticalities on the metabolic profile. The technological objective is to develop protocols (via economical and environmentally sustainable processes/ technologies) for producing foods and meals having both a high nutritional value and affordability as well as acceptability characteristics for EU low income populations. The overall objective of the project is to enable the preparation of healthier, affordable and tasty meals having a right nutritional balance by matching the nutritional needs of population groups at ROP with those methodologies suitable for food companies. CHANCE nutritional and educational strategies will produce guidelines for European Public Health policy dealing with the prevention of malnutrition in ROP population groups.

CHANCE is a three-year project, ending in 2014. The project is part of the EU FP7 Cooperation Work Programme: Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, and Biotechnology programme (KBBE-2010-2-3-03).

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