• The consortium prepared the annual working plan for this 2021 (and beyond). 

During the last quarter of 2020, the food and packaging value chains were analysed, and clusters’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats were identified. This information forms the basis of a 5-year common partnership strategy that aims to bring cluster services to a higher level aligning them with the market needs and trends.  

Later on, in January, the clusters that compose the consortium of Safe Smart Food published a set of new services and activities in line with the five key strategic axes defined in the common strategy: 

1. Reinforce cluster’s governance, brand reputation and attractiveness, and support members in their core business activities 

2. Promote sustainability across value chain 

3. Encourage members competitiveness through innovation 

4. Reinforce international collaboration and information exchange 

5. Lead bigger and bolder projects, including EU ones, with higher impact in the industry 

These new services include the international promotion of regional initiatives, the organisation of a biannual sustainability summit, sensitisation and training events about sustainability, the creation of an innovation working group with whom identifying needs and trends to work with, business missions, biannual hackathons, and ideation and challenges identification sessions for projects. 

But, beyond the 5-year plan, what is going on this year?  

Safe Smart Food will be organising at least three more ClusterXchange activities between March and September (more info about what is the ClusterXchange pilot here), creating an innovation itinerary identifying the musts and trends in food and packaging innovation next month, publishing a training e-book for clusters and launching an international newsletter in June, and preparing a big networking meeting point in September. 

So far, the year started with the finalisation of the first ClusterXchange, which had sustainability as the main topic and where food waste & circular economy, reusable and recyclable packaging, and energy efficiency were discussed. Also with the inauguration of a series of six webinars about different topics to improve clusters management excellence such as Promote Entrepreneurship and Shared Value among many others. These webinars will provide the content of the mentioned e-book that will be available on our website: https://safesmartfood.eu/ 

Do not hesitate to contact us for further information: [email protected]  

The Safe Smart Food project is composed by 5 clusters from 4 EU countries, Smart Food Cluster (Lithuania), Business Upper Austria (Austria), Packaging Cluster (Spain), Foodservice Cluster (Spain) and Food Products Quality Cluster (Latvia), who have come together to promote the internationalisation of the associated clusters and their member companies. 

The aims of the project are to strengthen the collaboration between clusters and improve their management capacity to create the conditions of a favourable ecosystem in the agri-food sector to boost innovation, competitiveness, and internationalisation of SMEs and to offer to the cluster’s SMEs an integrated program of services based on excellence.