We are proud to announce that LIKE-A-PRO together with the recently funded European project ‘GIANT LEAPS’ have become members of Horizon4Proteins, a collaboration launched in 2021 by four EU-funded projects working on alternative proteins (NextGenProteins, ProFuture, Smart Protein and SUSINCHAIN).
While facing climate change and natural resource scarcity, ensuring sufficient, nutritious, safe and affordable food to a fast-growing world population with changing dietary habits becomes increasingly challenging. The protein supply is in this respect most critical. Integration of a variety of new or alternative protein sources from both terrestrial and aquatic origins into new and/or existing processes or products needs to be explored, in order to develop and ensure more sustainable, resilient supply chains, featuring high consumer acceptability by a clean labelling approach and attractive market opportunities.
Sharing this goal, the four projects have been working together in key aspects such as: consumer acceptance of alternative proteins, safety and regulatory challenges, food applications and sustainability.
LIKE-A-PRO and GIANT LEAPS’s involvement will ensure continuity of the Horizon4Protein initiative and, through this collaboration, both projects will support the EU transition towards a more sustainable and resilient food system.
Learn more about the Horizon4Protein initiative in the video below.
Accelerating the transition from animal-based to alternative dietary proteins – the dietary shift – is key to reducing the footprint of our food system in terms of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), energy, water and land use and other relevant environmental impacts, while improving the health and well-being of people, animals and the planet. The Horizon Europe project GIANT LEAPS delivers the strategic innovations, methodologies and open-access datasets to speed up this dietary shift, in line with the Farm to Fork Strategy and contributing to the European Green Deal target of reaching climate neutrality by 2050.
Achieving the dietary shift in practice is inherently complex due to the diverse set of actors involved and further hindered by major knowledge gaps scattered across the various alternative protein sources and the domains of health (safety, allergenicity and digestibility), environment (GHGs and other environmental and climate impacts, biodiversity, circularity) and/or barriers to adoption (technological, sensory and consumer acceptance). The GIANT LEAPS consortium consists of key industrial and scientific actors and spans all expertise to address relevant knowledge gaps and proactively engages to arrive at optimized future diets based on alternative proteins that are broadly accepted across stakeholder groups. In order to deliver required insights for short, mid and long-term decision making and impact, a range of protein sources has been selected for either targeted or full assessment based on their current level of specification. The innovations and improved methods combined with accessible and comprehensive information, generated for a wide collection of alternative proteins, will enable policymakers to prioritise changes in the food system towards the dietary shift based on desired impact, value chain actors to make strategic scientific, business and investment choices, and the general public to make more sustainable and healthy dietary choices.
GIANT LEAPS project has received funding from the European Union’s HORIZON EUROPE research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 101059632.