DELICIOUS took part in the Working Group meeting of the COST Action CA24132 Mic2Food, contributing to the discussion with a poster focused on one of the issues that will be decisive for the future of microbial foods in Europe.
The project was represented at the meeting by Myrsini Kakagianni from the University of Thessaly, who presented the DELICIOUS poster and contributed to the exchange around innovation pathways for microbial foods.
Mic2Food, short for Accelerating Innovation and Development of European Microbial Foods, aims to support the development of new microbial foods for the European market. Its scope spans the full innovation pipeline, from identifying suitable non-pathogenic microorganisms and scaling up production processes, to downstream processing, food chemistry, commercialisation, regulation, and dissemination.
The poster presented a risk-informed framework for microbial food safety that links strain selection, fermentation and scale-up, and regulatory readiness across the development pipeline for microbial foods.
Its starting point is a clear challenge: microbial food innovation involves dynamic safety issues that evolve from early strain selection to industrial production and regulatory approval. In this context, the framework highlights three key areas that need to be addressed from the outset: strain variability, process-induced risk, and regulatory uncertainty.
The proposed approach integrates predictive microbiology and Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA) to support decision-making as data mature. In this way, safety is not treated as an isolated final step, but as a consideration that should inform development throughout the pipeline, from prediction and evaluation to validation.
The poster also showed why this framework is relevant to the objectives of Mic2Food. It connects strain selection, process development and regulatory readiness, supports the early identification of safety bottlenecks across the innovation pipeline, and can be adapted for training, educational material and dissemination activities.
