FuturFoodS - Accelerating Food Sustainability - through Household Dietary Shifts, Trust and Transparency, and Innovations in Circular Food Processing Systems

Fond National de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.-FNRS)

Sciences de la vie

The FutureFoodS Partnership

The FutureFoodS Partnership is one of eight cofunded partnerships launched by the EC under Cluster 6 of Horizon Europe to drive green and digital transitions. While the partnerships AGROECOLOGY, EUPAHW, SBEP and AgData also look at various aspects of agricultural and food production, the FutureFoodS partnership has a clear focus on food post-harvest.

The vision of the FutureFoodS Partnership is to collectively achieve environmentally friendly, socially secure and fair, economically viable, healthy and safe food systems in Europe by 2050.This is based on three identified priority needs:

1) The need for transformation of the current types of production, processing, distribution, and consumption in linear food chains towards circular food systems functioning within planetary boundaries;

2) The need for an overarching food systems approach to address several challenges in an integrative manner and empowering all relevant stakeholders, diverse voices and geographical regions;

3) The need for food that is safe, sustainable, healthy and from fair and trusted value chains for everyone.

The FutureFoodS Partnership aims to generate impact (summarized in General & Specific Objectives) through a combination of interrelated activities like case studies in living labs, agendas for research, innovation, policy-science topics and education and joint transnational calls for research and innovation (R&I) proposals across four thematic areas:

i. ‘Change the way we eat’;

ii. ‘Change the way we process and supply food’;

iii. ‘Change the way we connect with food systems’ and

iv. ‘Change the way we govern food systems.

What are guiding elements for FutureFoodS projects?

A. Transformative perspective

- Research should be solution- and impact-driven (proposals are required to set up an Impact Plan for food system transformation which follows a theory of change);

- Projects should investigate the context in which they operate (the Impact Plan is expected to include a problem- and context-analysis);

- The diversity of European food systems means that solutions for a more sustainable food system may vary depending on the context7, e.g. different geographical conditions, different institutional settings, different demographical or cultural settings.

B. Inter- and transdisciplinarity8

- Project consortia need to bring together scientific approaches from multiple academic disciplines or research fields (linking life sciences with social sciences and humanities);

- Consortia can choose the level of cross-disciplinarity, appropriate for the R&I questions under inquiry, project specific aims and Impact Plan.

C. Multi-stakeholder engagement9

- Engagement of stakeholders from different sectors, governance levels and countries to foster real-life relevance and applicability of R&I actions;

- Engagement should encompass all stages of the R&I process, from design to implementation and monitoring;

- The participation of a broad range of food system actors is encouraged along the “quadruple helix“ (science, policy, industry and society), e.g. citizens/ consumers, civil society organisations, food companies, research organisations, regional authorities, decision makers, municipalities and the food nutrition and health community.

D. Sustainability

- Projects should take all three dimensions of sustainability (environmental/ economic/socialincl. nutrition and health10) into account, but are not obliged to address all dimensions to the same extent;

- Projects should envisage clearly how they will contribute to the transformation towards sustainable food systems.

Call topis

Each application submitted under this call should focus on one of the three call topics listed below. The topic chosen should be clearly indicated in the proposal:

1 Domestic food practices for enhancing sustainable and healthy diets

2 Towards diverse, sustainable and circular food processing systems

3 Importance of trust and transparency

See details in the call text.

Financement

Each partner is funded separately by the national/regional funding organisation they are applying to. They must fulfil the conditions of their funding organisation.

The maximum amount of requested funding per project is 300.000 EUR for a total period of thee years. If the project involves the recruitment of a PhD student, the project duration of the F.R.S.-FNRS sub-project could be up to four years.

Eligible costs items

Personnel costs: 80,000€ EUR per year on average for the duration of the project. The usual duration of ERA-NET research programmes is three years. However, when the project involves a PhD student, the principal investigator can apply for an additional one year funding in order to complete the four years PhD programme. Since this programme is co-funded by the European Commission, this final year should not be included in the budget submitted to this call.

Equipment: can be eligible up to 20% of the total budget of the project

Running costs: travel expenses; organisation of small scientific events in Belgium; consumables and the following support costs: consumables Publication Designing (conception d’ouvrage) Dictionary Production (réalisation de dictionnaire) Purchase of Books Encoding Software Access Rights Congress Registration Fees Purchase of Computer Scanning Travel costs Visa costs Open Access publication of an article up until 500 euros (see F.R.S-FNRS Open Access policy).

“Overhead”

For “overhead” costs:

Operating expenses: up to 1% within the granted budget. This percentage should be included in the requested operating budget.

Personnel: up to 2% outside of the granted budget. This percentage will be paid upon reimbursement of expenses to institutions by the F.R.S.-FNRS.

Pour postuler

Transnational level

The co-funded call is conducted as a two-step-procedure. As a first step, a pre-proposal has to be submitted and following an invitation, a full-proposal can be submitted in a second step.

Proposals that are not submitted within the submission system on time will not be considered for evaluation and will be rejected.

The objective of a pre-proposal is to present the project idea, objectives and aim and the consortium without providing much detail on the work plan. Following the submission, pre-proposals will be checked against the general and national/regional eligibility criteria as defined in the respective funding regulations (see Annex I). Pre-proposals that do not pass the general and national/regional eligibility check will be rejected. Only eligible pre-proposals will be evaluated.

National/regional level

Applicants must provide basic administrative data by submitting an administrative application on e-space within 5 working days after the general deadline of the call to be eligible. Please select the “PINT-MULTI” funding instrument when creating the administrative application.

Deadlines

Deadline for pre-proposals is 11th of February 2026, 13:00:00 CET

Deadline for FNRS form is 18th of February 2026, 14:00:00 CET

Deadline for full-proposals is 27th of July 2026, 13:00:00 CEST

Requis d'admission

Transnational level

• The minimum requirement for project consortia is to be comprised of at least three partners

o 1) from at least three different Member States or Associated Countries participating in the call and

o 2) eligible to request funding from the FOs participating in this call and providing funding for the selected topic and project type (Table 3).

There is no rule for setting out the maximum number of partners that may participate in a consortium. The number should be appropriate to meet the project goals and should remain manageable (experience from past calls indicates a range of 4-8 partners per project);

• Each consortium applying must be led by a project Coordinator, who must be from an organisation eligible and applying for funding from a FO of this call;

• In order to achieve balanced consortia and promote real collaboration, the proportion of the overall effort that is allocated to all of the partners (excluding associated partners) from a single country shall not exceed 60% of the total number of person months allocated to the project;

• An individual affiliated to several organisations cannot request funding from more than one FO in one proposal. If participating in the call as an affiliate of more than one organisation, the individual must declare which partner and thus which organisation within the consortium they represent. That person will not be considered as two different partners within the sameconsortium;

• The same person cannot act as Principal Investigator of a Coordinator for more than one proposal. Please additionally check the relevant nat/reg regulations (Annex I).

• The maximum project duration is 36 months (please check Annex I for specifications);

• Proposals must be written in English;

• Proposals must be complete, respect page limits and the number/type of attachments allowed, including CV templates that are in line with sound principles for project assessment according to the proposal templates (Annexes C and D) and information provided in the online submission system;

Eligibility for belgian partners (F.R.S. - FNRS):

Applicants requesting funding from F.R.S. FNRS must comply with the following rules. The applicant must be affiliated to a university from the Wallonia-Brussels Federation (FWB).

At the closure of the call, the applicant should also:

- Be a permanent researcher of F.R.S-FNRS (Chercheur qualifié, maître de recherches ou Directeur de recherche) or;

- Hold a tenure track position (or an assimilated position including pending tenure track) with a research institution from the FWB

After the submission of applications, the F.R.S.-FNRS and the research institutions are required to verify the eligibility of the candidates. The F.R.S.-FNRS reserves the right to refuse those whose eligibility criteria would not comply with the Regulation. In order the check the compliance with these eligibility criteria, please contact your contact person at ULB-TTO (see details below). The complete F.R.S-FNRS rules for international research projects is available at the following link: https://www.frs-fnrs.be/docs/Reglement-et-documents/International/FRS-FNRS_PINT-Multi.pdf