FunFood Toolbox

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How do I key into consumer demand? How do I balance taste, ingredient costs and the need for specialized processing technologies? Where to find the right ingredients to address a growing and savvy market for functional foods and products?

Funfood toolbox is a cloud platform offering useful information for designing functional food. Interested entrepreneurs and those planning to engage in food business can cross-reference relevant market information, dip into legislative data and nutritional characteristics to create novel functional foods and products that satisfy certain dietary needs and food preferences.

The toolbox has been developed by KPAD Ltd. within agrifood accelerator KATANA. The platform is free of any fees.

Why Now and Why FunFood?

Recently, there’s been an explosion of demand on the side of consumers for products that are inherently highly functional. In other words, we want food and beverages that address health concerns, on-the-go lifestyles, aging issues and more. Whether it’s to help us sleep better, feed our immune system, relax or reduce stress, we want to know that the products we’re buying are nutrient-rich and especially beneficial for health and wellbeing. This is fueling the emergence of food products with functional benefits.

The functional food market is growing, but is fragmented. Listening to consumer preferences, understanding what consumers want to buy and when they want to buy is becoming increasingly difficult. The Toolbox is designed to offer a range of services, all valuable to food entrepreneurs and businesses, to help them nurture their food idea into a full-fledged functional food product.

No more trial and error. Starting with FunFood is easy!

Explore FUNFOOD

FunFood: Who is it for?

The Toolbox will help uncover functional food and beverage products that are safer, cheaper, fresher, more nutritious and environmentally friendly.

Food startups, food entrepreneurs, food makers, etc.
At FunFood, we offer an array of services, allowing food entrepreneurs and other innovators to handle functional food design issues, from functionality to flavor, in line with industry trends and legislative requirements.

Food and nutrition professionals
Using the Toolbox, professionals in the fields of food and nutrition can model special diet requirements for different consumer groups, and FunFood will help them tailor their offerings to the needs and preferences of their customers.

Researchers in food and nutrition science, R&D departments
Our goal is to bridge the gap from research to market. The Toolbox allows for experimentation with functional food scenarios, ensuring savings in time and costs in the R&D process.

Consumers with specific dietary needs
In case you have specific dietary requests/needs, get ready to discover a range of functional food and beverage products you may not even known existed.

How it Works?

The toolbox exploits relevant data concerning: (a) food category, (b) target groups, (c) bioactive compounds, (d) natural sources of bioactive compounds, (e) processes, (f) techno economic data, (g) data on European food legislations for health and safety issues, (h) market analysis, to enable the user to design functional food in a user-friendly and efficient manner, and to test and create various scenarios depending on the functional food target group.

USE CASE: New Juice products with desirable functionalities targeted to specific groups

Martin Alfonso is an organic fruit and vegetable producer from Valencia who wants to expand his activities by valorizing the wastes from the fields. In Vienna he made a contact with BioJuices SA, a small Italian company producing juices of high nutritional value. Together they are planning to design functional juices based on fruits and vegetables for particular target groups, such as athletes, children and pregnant women. Based on that they establish a collaboration with Agata Gozdzik, a nutrition scientist from Poland. The nutritionist provides the requirements according to the particular profile of each group. Based on these nutrient requirements KATANA FunFood toolbox will propose different scenarios (bioactive compounds category, new innovative processes, etc.). The consortium of three European SMEs starts a crowdfunding platform offering packs of juices and various promotional material to supporters.