Is born EcoFood2023, the largest innovation ecosystem in the Spanish agri-food sector, with nearly 100 member companies. The project has been led by AVS Consulting and Pons IP, consultancies specialized in the management of public aid for R&D and management of technology and industrial property.
Its creators decided that the presentation would take place in the next call of the PERTE Agri-food within the framework of the Transformation, Recovery and Resilience Plan financed by the European Commission. The proposal will require an investment of more than 100 million euros and will mean the creation of nearly 2,000 direct jobs and the maintenance of 4,500 existing ones linked to EcoFood2023 companies.
The value proposition of Ecofood2023 involves addressing the R+D+i of the main value chains of the food sector through 12 autonomous communities such as the Valencian Community, Catalonia, the Region of Murcia, Galicia, Castilla La Mancha, Madrid, Castilla and León, Andalusia, La Rioja, Asturias, the Basque Country and Extremadura.
Thus, the EcoFood2023 initiative proposes to work in 41 coordinated projects which practically cover the entire technological advance of nine strategic value chains for the sector such as wine, beverages, fruit and vegetables, meat products, sweets, dairy, bakeries and fishing activity.
EcoFood2023, open call
At present, the project is still in the phase of attracting Spanish companies from the agri-food sector that may be interested in joining EcoFood, given that the objective of the promoters is to achieve up to 150 members before the formal presentation of the project to the PERTE Agroalimentario addressed to the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism.
Companies can participate with different degrees of integration, with individual, transversal or coordinated projects, and always maintaining the individual confidentiality of their R+D+i and the reservation of their iIndustrial property. Thanks to Ecofood, companies can definitely access Next Generation funds, in a call that will be published in November 2022, it will be resolved on the 1st Tim of 2023.
For each of these sectors, R+D+I projects will be developed to allow the incorporation of new technologies for critical areas such as food traceability, environmental Protection o energy saving measures with the aim of modernizing the sector through innovation in the value chain, the digital transition, the ecological transition and training actions for employees.
This project was born with an innovative vocation, also in management. Thus, EcoFood2023 will have a technological management led by AVS Consulting and Pons IP where, according to both promoting entities, industrial property will be one of the main tools for the Innovation Management with the aim of supporting partners in a transversal way in the identification and definition of protection strategies and enhancement of the assets that are generated.
In this sense, Nuria Marcos, general director of Pons IP, pointed out that Ecofood “It is a great opportunity to accelerate innovation in the agri-food industry in its broadest sense, promoting aspects such as food traceability or the automation of industrial processes towards more sustainable models. At PONS IP we work with companies in this sector that are already aware of industrial property management as a fundamental factor within their R+D+i systems. They are already protecting their brands, their software, their products and processes… With this initiative we intend to go one step further and generalize these good practices”.
