Flagging up investment for the European food industry, Brussels yesterday announced it would release €658 million for health and food research, touching genomics, biotechnology, and food safety.
The food industry, facing growing pressure on innovation to sustain growth, must ensure it saps all the possible funding it can obtain.
Food firms need to pour resources into their R&D departments.
At the ingredients end, suppliers in Europe appear to invest between about 2.8 per cent and 12.9 per cent of their sales on R&D.
The food makers are spending less percentage wise, between 0.5 and 1.5 per cent. In its year end results Nestle recently cited R&D costs up 0.3 per cent to 1.6 per cent of sales, or CHF1.4 billion on total turnover of CHF 87 billion.
Recent figures on research and development (R&D) expenditure from Europe's statistic's gathering body Eurostat show that overall investment is now nudging the two per cent mark.
In 2002, R&D expenditure accounted for 1.93 per cent of GDP in the EU 25 - an increase of 0.11 per cent since 1998. The overall increase is not huge, but a number of countries have seen a significant growth in investment.
The latest funding from Brussels falls within the EU's Sixth Research Framework Programme (FP6, 2002-2006), and is the last major research round before the next Framework Programme (FP7), to be adopted in 2006.
According to the Commission, the objective of EU-funded agro-food research is to improve the "health and well-being of citizens through higher quality food and improved control of food production and related environmental factors."
The Commission will designate €125 million, allocated via the next call in the area of food quality and safety, to be published later this June.
Two thirds of the budget will go towards integrated projects and networks of excellence. But at least 15 per cent of the budget of the call is targeted at SME participation, said the Commission.
The calls will have two deadlines to accept research proposals: the first in late September/early October, and the second stage deadline around February 2006.
Topics for the food call include: the total food chain, epidemiology of food-related diseases and allergies, impact of food on health, and traceability processes along the production chain.