Brief overview of the three national projects disseminating in the seminar:

Food without Fields project explores the potential of new cellular agriculture and greenhouse technologies as part of the achievement of Finnish carbon neutrality and protein self-sufficiency targets. The project is part of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry's “Catch the Carbon” Research and Innovation Program, scheduled for 2021-2024 with budget of 1.5M€. The project will explore how new technologies will be integrated into the existing food chain. For example, the possibilities of using existing side-streams as production process inputs are studied. Project’s research partners are VTT, Luke and Enifer company. Industry partners of the project include Fazer, Solar Foods and Valio. Contact: Emilia.Nordlund@vtt.fi

CERAFIM develops cellular agriculture approaches for producing proteins and lipids for food and materials, in collaboration between VTT and Finnish companies. It aims to achieve sustainable food and material production through biotechnology and the use of side streams from agriculture, forestry and food processing. CERAFIM is a 2-year Business Finland co-innovation project, part of Business Finland’s Bio&Circular Finland program and Fortum’s ExpandFibre Veturi ecosystem. CERAFIM’s consortium consists, in addition to VTT, of the following companies: Brightplus, eniferBio, Fazer, Fortum, High Metal, Kemira, Onego Bio, Spinnova, UPM and Valio. Contact: Dorothee.Barth@vtt.fi

GrassProtein - Grass has a huge potential for biomass production under Finnish conditions and provides many ecosystem services, but more versatile ways are required for its utilization. Green biorefineries provide possibilities to fraction and extract various valuable components from the grass matrix for food, feed, biomaterials and energy. The GrassProtein project (2022 – 2024) is funded by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry / Makera, Valio and Atria and is conducted as a joint effort of Luke and VTT with the funders. It focuses on developing novel grass-based products with emphasis on feed and food grade proteins. Contact: Marketta.Rinne@Luke.fi