Advanced Food Products Prepared Through Academic and Industry Collaboration

New product development (NPD)is vital to the food industry because: 1) customer’s needs and wants are constantly changing, 2) trade customers want new products, 3) technical developments, 4) legislation, 5) competition, and 6) shortened product life-cycles. As NPD can be a time and resource consuming process companies and research centers are constantly investigating for structured processes which will enable cost – effective and timely product launches. A new, innovative open innovation (OI) model of collaboration process between university and industry focusing on food new product development (NPD) has been developed and implemented successfully over the last 8 years. In 2011, in view of the student’s eco-food competition “ecotrophelia” initiated in Greece by the Federation of Hellenic Food Industries (SEVT), we developed an and launched a campaign in order to recruit Greek food companies and develop together novel foods for the competition. The initiative was successful and productive thus is continued annually ever since. Overall, 18 innovative foods have been developed and produced at the pilot phase by 18 groups of students of the Department of Food Science and Nutrition (University of The Aegean), in collaboration with 10 Greek food companies.