Mate4Meat

09/10/2026

💡 Looking to fund your next green innovation or find consortium partners?

While MATE4MEAT isn't a Horizon project, we are always scouting the best collaboration opportunities for our network! Don't miss the Horizon Europe Cluster 5 Info Day & Brokerage Event:

📅 19 November 2026
📍 Hybrid (Brussels + Online stream)
💶 €873M budget for Climate, Energy & Mobility topics
🤝 Onsite Brokerage: Dedicated pitching & B2B meetings with prospective partners (organized by GREENET)

Explore call topics, get proposal tips, and connect with future consortium partners!

👉 Register & view the programme: https://research-innovation-community.ec.europa.eu/events/1BlOchF5f8ViHvC1DosGqo/overview

07/10/2026

Mate4Meat at 2026 European Researcher's Night in Cyprus on 25 September 2026.

Thank you to the Research and Innovation Foundation for organising this impactful event for one more year.

Our partners from Citizens In Power / Πολίτες Σε Ισχύ attended the event for the whole duration and talked about their projects to students of all levels and to the scientific community.

25/09/2026

at the in Nicosia,

18/09/2026

Our third is now available.

This new blog post, written by our partners in GTE Sustainability and Energy Consultancy, discusses how the hashtag project uses agro-industrial residues (like olive pomace) to create active meat packaging and why Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is crucial to proving its real-world environmental value.
Read the full post on our website to see how smart design can reduce both plastic waste and food spoilage:
👉 https://mate4meat.com/blogs-newsletters/

This section brings together the MATE4MEAT newsletters and blog posts published since the project began in July 2024. Each issue reports on the consortium’s progress towards bio-based, biodegradable and antimicrobial packaging for fresh meat, and is deposited in open access on Zenodo. All past iss...

17/09/2026

MATE4MEAT joined the PRIMA Joint Session at Tropentag 2026 online on 16/09/2026. 12 PRIMA and Horizon Europe projects presented years of Mediterranean research as one body of work rather than twelve separate ones.

The themes presented (water management, agroforestry, neglected and underutilised species, circular value chains) might not have been directly relevant to the MATE4MEAT project but the recurring problems were. Sustaining results, tools and platforms beyond project funding was listed under "harder than expected". So was the absence of harmonised indicator sets across projects working in the same countries, and the difficulty of moving from integrated solutions to integrated governance while institutions remain in sectoral silos.

During the Q&A CIP's assistant project manager raised the question of what happens to project results after the final month, and how their fair use is secured. There were some interesting replies by the main organisers and the discussion was fairly open and constructive. Tracking whether and how results and data are taken up after a project closes remains difficult. Open access repositories such as Zenodo are the main route for making public data and results available, and follow-up projects often carry earlier work forward. Both were recognised as important, and both leave room to strengthen how continuity is planned from the outset and that is precisely why sessions of this kind matter.

More information about the conference can be found here: https://prima-med.org/save-the-date-prima-joint-session-at-tropentag-2026/

15/09/2026

Bio-based is a starting point.
But is it actually sustainable? 🌱

As Europe accelerates the transition towards safer, circular and , attention is increasingly shifting from what a material is made of to how it performs across its entire life cycle.
The European Commission’s revised Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) framework and the EU Bioeconomy Strategy both reinforce the importance of considering sustainability from the earliest stages of material development.

This perspective is closely aligned with MATE4MEAT.

The project explores the use of residues and other biological resources to develop biopolymers and active antimicrobial materials for next generation , combining material innovation, and environmental performance.
Through (LCA), the environmental performance of these solutions is considered across their life cycle, supporting the identification of opportunities for improvement as the technologies develop.

Because sustainable packaging should not only be bio-based by design, but sustainable by evidence.


🔗 Learn more about MATE4MEAT: https://mate4meat.com/

11/09/2026

Worth ten minutes of your time if you work in Mediterranean R&I.

MATE4MEAT is a PRIMA-funded project developing bio-based antimicrobial packaging to extend the shelf life of meat products which places it squarely within the sustainable food systems, reduced food loss, and circular bio-based solutions for the Mediterranean priorities that this consultation is asking about.

Consultations like this are one of the few moments where what we learn inside a project feeds directly into how the next generation of European Partnerships is designed.

So this is an open invitation to our consortium partners, to the projects we cluster with (Olivepack and SEEDs) and to colleagues running parallel actions:

Take part. The 2028–2034 framework will be shaped by whoever takes the time to respond, and the Mediterranean agri-food community has a great deal of practical evidence to contribute.

📅 Deadline: 16 October 2026
Link: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/16413-Horizon-Europe-European-Partnerships-to-be-implemented-as-joint-undertakings/public-consultation_en

24/08/2026

Sustainable packaging is a market, policy and consumer question, all in one.

Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems has published an open-access editorial introducing a collection of studies on sustainable active packaging, covering technological, consumer and environmental perspectives. It is a useful snapshot of where the wider field stands, and it is free to read in full.

We are sharing it because it speaks to the same question behind MATE4MEAT.

Our PRIMA-funded consortium brings together research institutions, industry and stakeholders across the Mediterranean to develop sustainable packaging alternatives for fresh meat.

Whether alternatives of this kind succeed will not be decided by researchers alone. It will depend on producers, retailers, regulators and consumers finding them workable.

So we would like to hear from you:

What would most influence your decision to choose, stock or approve a sustainable packaging alternative over a conventional one?

🫰cost
✔️availability
📝regulation
📈confidence in how it performs

Read the editorial for free here: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-systems/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2025.1671779/full

07/08/2026

As most of our partners and colleagues have gone out of office for a while to clear their minds and take the time to enjoy the sun and the summer vibes, we would like to wish all of the Mate4Meat partners, colleagues and followers to have a good rest of the summer, spend wonderful time with their family and friends and recharge their batteries for the fall.

13/07/2026

Bio-based packaging that keeps meat fresh and safe, without the environmental cost of conventional plastics. That is the challenge is working on.

At Biotech 2026, the Italian Congress of Biotechnology at the University of Verona which was held on 24 -26 June, our coordinator UNINA presented the Mate4Meat Project, offering the biotechnology community an inside look at the project's work on , and packaging solutions.

With sessions spanning food, industrial and environmental biotechnology, the congress was a fitting stage to share progress and connect our research with the people who can carry it toward real world uptake.

Our thanks to the Italian Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the University of Verona for a valuable exchange.

For more information on the conference click here: https://sib-biochemistry.it/services/biotech2026-2/