Organisation

Top Institute Food and Nutrition: unique public/private partnership

Top Institute Food and Nutrition: unique public/private partnership

In the face of today’s challenge to make the healthy choice the easy choice, it is vital for the food industry and research organisations to pool knowledge and resources for multidisciplinary research. Top Institute (TI) Food and Nutrition is a unique public/private partnership that generates vision on scientific breakthroughs in food and nutrition, resulting in the development of innovative products and technologies that respond to consumer demands for safe, tasty and healthy foods. In TI Food and Nutrition the research is flexibly organised in themes and projects, and jointly decided on and guided by the research and industry partners. All research is carried out in the laboratories of the research organisations by multidisciplinary teams. These teams comprise leading scientists who are collaborating to achieve scientific breakthroughs of high industrial relevance. TI Food and Nutrition plays a major role in providing its industry partners with leads for the development of new, healthy foods with regard to major health concerns such as obesity and metabolic syndrome. These leads are essential for developing safe food products with excellent taste qualities, products that meet increasingly complex and specific nutritional requirements such as low fat, high protein, low salt and slow carbohydrate. Another focus lies on generating a knowledge base for use in developing fermented foods with improved functionality and which may target microbial activity in the gastrointestinal tract. Over the past ten years, the institute has proven its added value as the crucial link for its industry and research partners. Over 30 patents have been filed and innovative products with TI Food and Nutrition knowledge have been introduced. The results achieved and experiences gained underscore the ambition to increase the size and scope of the research portfolio and attract new partners from Europe’s food and nutrition industry. This ambition to develop into a European institute with an annual budget of up to €40 million is supported financially by the Dutch government.