About us
METROFOOD-RI - Infrastructure for Promoting Metrology in Food and Nutrition (www.metrofood.eu) is a distributed RI aimed at promoting scientific excellence in the field of food quality and safety. It provides high-quality metrology services in food and nutrition, comprising an important cross-section of highly interdisciplinary and interconnected fields throughout the food value chain, including agrifood, sustainable development, food safety, quality, traceability and authenticity, environmental safety, and human health.
It combines a Physical-RI (P-RI) and an electronic-RI (e-RI) for open data deposition, access, and processing. The P-RI coordinates and integrates an existing network of state-of-the-art facilities including: in the “Metro” side, laboratories for the full chemical, physical-chemical, and microbiological characterisation of foods and any matrix of interest concerning the agrifood (e.g., environmental matrices from the agroecosystem of production, feeds, food contact materials, etc.), and plants for Reference Material (RM) development and production; in the “Food” side, experimental fields/farms for crop production and animal breeding, small-scale plants for food processing and storage, kitchen-labs for food preparation, and “demo” sites for direct stakeholder engagement (e.g., to run Living Labs).
The e-RI consists of a service-oriented electronic architecture providing an accessible platform for sharing and integrating data, knowledge, and information on metrological tools for food analysis and for facilitating the availability and use of agrifood data to the user community. The e-RI collects, integrates, and makes the P-RI results open and interoperable, organising and complementing them with existing data and providing tools for various uses of the data, even promoting their interoperability and integration with data arising from other existing networks and infrastructures.
METROFOOD-RI users are individuals, teams or institutions who are foreseen to use the services of the RI. Four main user categories have been identified as follows: Researchers and academic communities; Policy makers/food inspection and control agencies; Food business operators (FBOs); Consumers/citizens.
METROFOOD-RI is structured according to a Hub & Nodes model. The Central Hub (CH) will be the statutory seat of the ERIC and will represent the heart of the strategy, coordination, communication, and administration of METROFOOD-RI, coordinating the overall infrastructure and managing the central e-portal, which will give access to all the resources and services of the infrastructure. The CH will act as a coordinating European layer across all National Nodes (NNs), while the NNs will represent the operational sites of the infrastructure.
METROFOOD-RI is one of the six new projects selected by ESFRI for the strategic potential and impact for strengthening European research, included in the ESFRI Roadmap 2018.
