Delegations of China and USA visiting NF4

Submitted by Jeroen Wouters on 13 December 2018

On December 3rd and December 10th delegations of China and USA, respectively visited Foodvalley NL, the food innovation cluster based in The Netherlands. During an interactive meeting on December 3rd in Wageningen, The Netherlands, the CIPA organisation and a series of accompanying food companies (SMEs as well as larger companies) presented itself. CIPA is the investment and promotion agency of the Ministry of Commerce of China. The organisation focusses on the implementation of China's "Bringing in" and "Going Global" policies for domestic and overseas collaboration. The interest of the China-based companies was in the "Processed Foods" and "Nutritional and Health Ingredients" value chains, defined as target value chains of the NF4-project. The contacts in this delegation are of assistance in the activities of the New Frontiers in Food Fast Forward (NF4) project that supports the internationalization of SMEs. China is one of the defined target countries. An innovation tour towards China by the NF4-project is scheduled to take place from May 12th-19th 2019, including the visit of SIAL China in Shanghai, which is open for participation by SMEs from Europe in the participation clusters. More information on the tour: https://newfrontiersinfood.eu/event/innovation-tour-to-china-during-sial-shanghai/

In addition, on December 10th a delegation of the California Department of Food and Agriculture visited the FoodvalleyNL offices in Wageningen, The Netherlands, with a group of 3 start up companies from the Silicon Valley, San Francisco area. The activities of FoodvalleyNL and the New Frontiers in Food Fast Forward project were further explained and discussed, while specific focus was on the interactions with the startup companies. The interests of fhese companies centered around the "Connected Food" value chain as well as the "Processed Food" value chain with circular economy approaches. The interaction with the USA will be followed up by an innovation tour towards the USA in March 2019. More information on tour can be found at  https://newfrontiersinfood.eu/event/innovation-tour-usa/

More information about the application procedure for participation in the tours is available at: https://newfrontiersinfood.eu/project/. The application call opens on December 15th 2018.

The NF4 project is an internationalization fast track accelerator for innovation-intensive food SMEs, powered by a 5-partner food clusters alliance: Clusaga (ES); Food Valley (NL); Valorial (FR); Vitagora (FR) and Wagralim (BE). The activities are  specialized on 3 food industry value chains: processed foods, health&nutritional food products and connected food. These value chains provide a full package of acceleration services, aiming at boosting international collaboration and business development of a cohort of European food SMEs. Within the project 4 overseas target markets are selected in which the consortium is already strongly connected: Canada, USA, China and Brazil.

Cluster organisation
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