Fourth "evolved" range, innovative fruit and vegetable snacks, fresh juices subjected to high pressure treatments. Product and process innovation is at home at Macfrut (Rimini Expo Center 8-10 May 2024) protagonist in the first edition of Innovation Hub For Healthy Food, the new exhibition dedicated to sustainable products and transformation technologies for food production based on fruit and vegetables, with high nutritional value.

Created in collaboration with the University of Bologna, Department of Agro-Food Sciences and Technologies (Distal), the Cesena Food Science Campus and the Agri-Food Industrial Research Center (Ciri-Agro), it offers five thematic in-depth workshops, an exhibition part with innovative national, regional and European projects together with the Alma Mater, the presentation of a special focus on Arab and Mediterranean countries in the FocusER project.

The focus of the Show is innovation in the fruit and vegetable supply chain, an increasingly central theme in light of climate change and product sustainability. Themes that will be at the center of five workshops together with researchers from all over the world, to understand what innovation in fruit and vegetables will be in the near future. Two workshops will concern the fourth range both in terms of process and product innovation, and its evolution through biocontrol, enrichment and edible coating strategies that allow an improvement in nutritional quality and/or an extension of self-life. And again, fresh juices (fermented or not) subjected to non-thermal stabilization/functionalization treatments, while another specific focus is dedicated to minimally processed fruit and vegetable snacks. Finally, in the last workshop we will talk about fresh-like vegetable creams through the application of emerging non-thermal treatments and precision fermentations.

“The peculiarity of these five workshops is that they are not simple conferences", explain the coordinators of the Show, Francesca Patrignani and Pietro Rocculi of the University of Bologna, "but moments of discussion linked, subsequently, to demonstrations at the stands of the companies exhibitors. At the same time it will be possible to taste these product innovations. All this in specific moments that do not last more than two hours in total."

At the same time as the content part, in the Innovation Hub For Healthy Food area there is a commercial part with the presence of numerous companies in the healthy sector, whose products are increasingly proving to be virtuous alternatives to ultra-processed foods.