NAFISPACK (Natural Antimicrobial for Innovative and Safe Packaging) EU Research Project: objectives and current outcomes

Scientific research was one of the first and most important functions that the European community shared and harmonized. In 1984, the European Commission (the executive body of the EU) launched the first pluriannual Framework Programme (FP1) for research and technological development. Since then the FPs have played a leading role in multidisciplinary research and cooperative activities in Europe and beyond, and in each FP the themes of packaging, and food packaging in particular, have had much relevance, leading to important results and real and effective consequences in real life. 2007 saw the start of the seventh programme which is both larger and more comprehensive than earlier Framework Programmes. It will run to 2013 with a budget of 53.2 billion euros, the largest funding allocation yet for such programmes. Also in this latest project, the themes of safe and innovative packaging are well represented, attracting the attention of several research groups in research centers and universities in Europe. The first project concerning food packaging approved for funding in the first call of FP7 was NAFISPACK, acronyms that stays for Natural Antimicrobial for Innovative and Safe Packaging, and the project started at the end of November 2008 . The delivery of safe food from the producer to the consumer requires meticulous monitoring at every stage in the supply chain, a concept now called “farm-to-fork”. The “farm-to-fork” philosophy underlines the fact that the quality and safety of food is a major priority for the industry and authorities. Packaging plays here a crucial role since its most important functions are preservation and protection of food. Packaging materials are good substrates where an active substance, that can be usefully released to the food, can be placed. In NAFISPACK project, interest is focused on the preservation of fresh food which has short shelf life due to its rapidly spoilage by microorganism. As in most solid and semi solid foods the microorganisms grow mainly at the surface thus, the concept of incorporating antimicrobial agents into or onto the food contact material has been widely developed in the past. The concern about synthetic preservatives, however, is steadily rising due to a limited documentation on safety and tolerance. Instead, natural antimicrobials (NAs) are time tested as food additives and ingredients but, in general, isolation of bioactive components from natural sources and their use in packaging pose new parameters of evaluation and new problems for several different reasons. Some of these reasons are related to the effectiveness of the active substance on target microorganism, others deal with the NAs capacity of overcoming the process for including them in a packaging materials; others are related to their chemical stability, solubility, diffusion kinetics, others refer to the availability, the costs, the food and packaging law. This situation deserves a very careful evaluation of many points that have been little or never faced in the past. The lecture will present the main, strategic objectives of the three years project NAFISPACK and will detail the specific objectives that will be achieved through out an interdiciplinary and joint work of research. It will also introduce the 17 partners involved in NAFISPACK network, their specific competences and how their scientific job is related and managed. Finally, preliminary results in the NAs selection and in the choice of process technologies to be used in manufacturing the new packaging materials, will be shortly presented.