Open Science for a Sustainable Food Future | Plant2Food

Plants2Food is a platform that funds research projects where companies and universities work together on solving some of the problems in the plant-based foods production system. It enables companies and universities to work closely together and the money in the platform goes to cover the cost of the research happening at the universities. We're working with open research here where it's pre-competitive so the results can be shared with everybody. That is especially strong when you want to make a transition in the world because the research can be used by anybody that could have use of it. There are no patents and no other barriers to using the results. It's a bit like software that is open source so anybody can build on it because the results can be used anywhere in the world for all companies. In this program we foster collaboration between academia and industry by inviting companies to share their challenges and have researchers listen to this and come with suggestions on how things can be improved. So you can say it's a playground for industry and academia to get together, get to understand each other and make great research projects to actually make a practical positive change. Wageningen University Research Bureau is involved in supporting the scientists that are writing the proposals with the search for the right industry partners that actually can contribute to such a project and by checking the pre-competitive nature of such projects. We bridge the gap between the research and the real world applications by matching the problems that the companies and the industry encounters with the expertise that we can bring into the project. The benefits for the private sector partners are when it matches their strategy that they can use the outcome, the results of those projects to improve their own production processes and to get new insights that help them creating better products and thereby contributing to the green transition. So the Fabaprocessor project is a collaboration between the Netherlands and Denmark and we aim to integrate the whole value chain in Fababean, an important protein crop from breeders, producers, processors to food companies. One of the key problems in Fababean in northern Europe is consistency of the production. So not every year the crop yields the same and it has some impacts also on the taste. So in this project we aim to improve the resilience of the crop, so the production, but also even enhance the taste through interventions in breeding and management. So the plant of food program really allows us to bring everybody together across the value chain in a sort of open exchange of knowledge. For this type of integrative research it's really important to understand what everybody in the value chain wants and needs from the plant so that the breeders optimize the crop for the ultimate goal of these crops which is for plant-based foods, so the consumer side. The transition to a more plant-based diet is very important to fill the gap in the intake in fibers because we know that in western diets there is a low intake of fibers. From a planetary health perspective it's also very important to decrease greenhouse gas emissions. I'm very positive about the opportunity that we have here at Wageningen University and Research about taking plants, creating them into tasty and healthy products and using them to create a sustainable and healthy future for both human health and planetary health. The work in plants and food aligns with the goals of COP30 because what we make of beneficial changes in the food system for the temperate agricultural part of the world will also affect the rest of the world and the way we're trying to pave here is in a more resource efficient way of feeding the population and all the learnings from our climate zones of the world many of those learnings can be applied globally.