Fighting rice fraud and empowering the Mediterranean rice industry

iBET’s Food & Health division has recently launched a new video highlighting our researchers’ contribution within the TRACE-RICE European consortium.

Rice is the primary staple food for about half of the world’s population, providing 20% of the calories consumed worldwide. In addition, the relevance of rice has been increasing in the European diets, with most of the rice consumed in Europe being cultivated in EU Mediterranean countries, including Portugal.

Due to this high demand on rice and on specific rice varieties such as basmati rice, rice-based foods are highly prone to adulteration. In fact, rice fraud has been recognized as an emerging food issue worldwide by the EFSA.

Considering these challenges, the TRACE-RICE consortium was created and is committed on providing the Mediterranean rice industry, and ultimately the end-consumers, with:

• Highly efficient and affordable analytical and digital technologies that will facilitate the traceability and authenticity control of rice varieties.

• New nutritional and tasty rice-based food products, based on a circular economy approach, that valorise the rice industry’ by-products.

iBET is one of the seven Portuguese organizations participating in the consortium, taking on several key tasks in two work packages. These tasks encompass characterizing the chemical composition of different rice varieties and developing sustainable and green strategies to obtain natural ingredients from rice by-products, such as rice bran.

To know more about iBET’s role in the TRACE-RICE project, we invite you to watch the short video here.

TRACE-RICE with Grant nº 1934 is part of the PRIMA Programme supported under Horizon 2020, the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, with a total investment of 1.6M euros.