European Commission is Funding Research on Mass Customized / Personalized Food - Call for SMEs to particiapte

While the European Commission since many year has supported lot of research on mass customization, they now have issued a specialized call on personalisation and customisation of food.

In their call "KBBE.2012.2.3-04: Personalised approaches to food production and distribution" they ask for proposals to research this issue in a consortium of SMEs and Research Institutes.

The aim is to further develop processing, packaging and distribution aspects of convenient, personalised food products attractive to the consumer. Personalisation can take many forms, and might refer to individual health or lifestyle aspects and/or address personal preferences regarding quality, portion size or cost, convenience, packaging, taste or pleasure, or it might concern specific target groups.

Interestingly, they clearly say that they WANT MORE THAN known approaches like nutrigenomics, genotyping and phenotyping; specific nutrients or dietary advice, but demand a real prototype of a customizable food product:

"The conceptual models should be applied to developing prototype foods for a limited segment of the market, preferably in a demonstration unit."

I hope the people at the EU are aware that a lot of this is happening already in the European Community, driven by great entrepreneurs like Chocri, MyMuesli, Allmytea, and many others!

If anyone thinking of participating in the call and submitting a proposal still needs a partner in form of a great research group with much knowledge on customization, let me know :-)

More info on this in the meta call, Call: FP7-KBBE-2012-6.