The control of raw materials and processed food is nowadays mandatory and requires novel safety and quality assurance methodologies. GoodFood proposes the vertical integration of these needs by developing a set of systems with clear breakthrough solutions to specific safety and quality and traceability requirements. Specific demands at different critical steps of the food chain were identified by the agrofood community: control of raw materials and feed supply, improvement of food processing, monitoring of storage and logistics, and control of safety and quality of final products. The figure identifies for a complete food chain the different stages for which a need for increasing the control of products exists.

A set of detection targets of vital importance have been also identified by the same relevant food industry representatives. In this direction, the presence of chemical substances (antibiotics, pesticides and mycotoxins) and of life organisms (pathogens ) have been considered the most relevant issues to be addressed from the safety point of view. Similarly, two monitoring approaches, the continuous control during life time and the punctual monitoring, are of the highest interest for different aspects of quality assurance. The proposed activities are not ‘watertight' but have common areas of collaboration. They will be also integrated under an Ambient Intelligence approach which will allow fully interconnection and communication of multisensing systems. GoodFood addresses this AmI vision as a horizontal task providing common communication solutions to the different technological developments of the application driven research activities proposed. The agrofood field is so fragmented that there are countless applications where the abovementioned visionary ideas could be implemented. The present project restricts itself to a realistic limited number of applications that are nevertheless representative of a broad range of problematics involving solid and liquid products: milk, dairy products, fruits and fruit juices, wine, and fish . An important agricultural application related to the project will be addressed for implementing a very significative pilot site for demonstrating the approach. A winery has been chosen as it allows a cost effective imple mentation for a rich niche market and with the potential of obtaining proof of concept results at a short/mid term, ideally suited in terms of sustainability and scalability. Because of the winery demonstrator not cover all the critical steps of a complete food chain, some additional case studies have been identified.