The skeleton of the tower is completed and the outline of the “house” of the Food Project, within the university campus of Parma, begins to take shape after five years of gestation. Here by the spring of 2023 the best of skills, innovation and training in the agri-food field will converge, enhancing the contamination between academia, industry and international research centers, with the aim of offering concrete answers to the great challenges of the planet, from the struggle to malnutrition to sustainability.
“Food Project is only the latest piece of a virtuous and now consolidated partnership in the food valley between university and industrial research, which sinks into the centuries-old tradition of this territory but looks to the future, because we cannot stop at typical products, without technological innovation. we will be able to guarantee food in a healthy, safe and sustainable way for all for a long time. Here there will be the new research laboratories and teaching structures and here the skills of international researchers and our 200 researchers will be integrated, including microbiologists, chemists, nutritionists, doctors, technologists, agronomists, veterinarians, but also economists, jurists and humanists “, explains Erasmo Neviani, project coordinator and deputy director of the Food and Drug Sciences department of the University of Parma.
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The “home” of research and agri-food knowledge is the result of an investment of 11.5 million euros, financed by Miur and the Emilia-Romagna Region, with almost 4 million private contributions (in the front row among Barilla, Chiesi , Mutti) and could only arise in the Unesco creative city of gastronomy, the national cradle of the richest DOP and IGP (Parmigiano Reggiano and Prosciutto di Parma above all), seat of the European food safety authority Efsa, Italian Capital of Culture 2020 -2021.
Next to Building 1, which will host the hub for research, teaching and the Third Mission, will also move the School of Higher Studies in Food and Nutrition, founded two years ago to offer postgraduate international masters and summer schools, and the Food business incubator to accelerate start-ups. The Region does not hide the ambition to start from here to replicate in the food valley the experience of an alliance between all the universities of the Via Emilia and the industrial brands to start an international super-university, in the wake of what has been done in the motor valley with Muner, the Motorvehicle University of Emilia-Romagna.
The Food project is the most recent expression of an acceleration in terms of training of excellence based on the synergy between businesses and schools, to which “Parma io ci sto!” Is contributing, the association founded in 2016 to study projects to relaunch the territory. A province, Parma, which owes 42% of its exports to the agro-industry, between food and plant engineering, and in the food sector alone it has over a thousand companies with 14 thousand employees and 7.5 billion in turnover. In addition to the four post-diploma specialist courses of the ITS Tech & Food for food industry technicians, a pilot laboratory-company experience unique in Italy, Food Farm 4.0, was born, involving six schools, led by the Galilei-Bocchialini institute of Parma. , and 12 companies: the boys, 500 each year, make jams, bread and cheeses made “at school” and sell them on the market under the “Bontà di Parma” brand. And now the first permanent school in Technology and milling commodities has also started, while in Langhirano, in the Parma ham district, the construction of the territorial laboratory for the Academy has begun.