TRACE-RICE – Tracing Rice and Valorizing Side Streams along Mediterranean Blockchain

Rice is the primary staple food for about half of the world’s population and it provides 20% of the calories consumed worldwide. The relevance of rice in the European diet has been increasing due to its fundamental role in modern and healthy diets. Most of the rice consumed in Europe is grown in the EU Mediterranean countries.

Rice is endowed with a rich genetic diversity that covers a great variety of species and origins, some more valued than others. Rice-based foods are highly prone to adulteration. Rice fraud was reported by EFSA as an emerging food issue. The principal occurrence are fraudulent variety claims that cause significant loss of value for the consumers and jeopardize brand value of honest producers. ln addition, fraudulent misrepresentation related to sustainability issues (pesticides residues and mycotoxins) is an increasing risk.

TRACE RICE offers an innovative solution to fraud and safety challenges focusing on natural, healthy and tasteful rice-based foods by applying new technologies for product traceability. lt will do so with an integrated full chain approach (from farm to fork), for raw rice and ready-to-eat rice, which will enhance the competitiveness of SMEs operating in the rice sector.

TRACE-RICE is focused on providing the Mediterranean rice industry with:

• Highly-efficient and affordable analytical and digital technologies that will facilitate fast traceability and authenticity control of rice varieties;
• New nutritional and healthy tasty rice-based foods and high added-value products based on an interdisciplinary integrated chain-wide and circular economy approach.

This will be achieved in 4 main pilot activities and 3 market replication cases, starting the technological developments at prototype scale (TRL3-5) and will move to validation/production stages (TRL7-8).

TRACE-RICE with Grant nº 1934, (call 2019, section 1 Agrofood) is part of the PRIMA Programme supported under Horizon 2020, the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.