Call Guidance for Priority Area 4: Food Safety at Home

Total Fund: £70K

Scope: Understanding and navigating risk in food storage, preparation and consumption at home.

Eligible Activities: Existing collaborations on food safety between researchers and food businesses that can be delivered by 24 March 2025. Activities can include small collaborative research projects that are demonstrational or translational, or events that support the formation of functional communities and partnerships that are pursuing knowledge exchange, new capabilities, or new funding models.

Project Budget: £1K to £10K at 100% FEC (anticipating around ten projects total)

Opening Date: 24 October 2024

Closing Date: 14 November 2024 (17:00)

Decision made: 26 November 2024 (anticipated)

Project start date: 1st- 9th December 2024

Award completion date: no later than 24 March 2025

Indicative reporting deadline: 25 April 2025

How can I apply?

• Apply for the Food Safety Research Network PA4 Award

What is this opportunity?

The UK Food Safety Research Network is a community connecting partners across the food industry, academia, and government to consider and apply science to improve the safety of foods in the UK.

This BBSRC-funded network aims to address microbial risk in the food chain, with the goal of introducing new capability, knowledge, or skills to help reduce these risks.

The FSRN has announced in 2024 the new Priority Area 4: Food Safety at Home. To launch this new priority area, we are inviting applications for flexible talent mobility or seeding projects.

The aim of this funding is to access training opportunities, establish novel or strengthen existing collaborations between partners exploring shared challenges, identify promising areas of impactful activities, and achieve our ambition of establishing a longer-term sustainable collaborative network. To achieve this goal, we invite applications to our streamlined assessment for cross-sector and/or cross-disciplinary projects centred around the following food safety challenges and opportunities to:

• Enable innovation-focused research activities at leading UK Research Organisations with a strategic interest in food safety to improve the security and resilience of the UK’s food system 
• Strengthen collaboration between the UK’s world-class research base and organisations involved in understanding consumer behaviour or developing behaviour change interventions 
• Enable activities to de-risk and test potential solutions for food safety challenges, progressing the research to a point where organisations/ consumers can justify further investments 
• Prepare the UK research base for further investment in a thematic area of strategic importance to the UK and relevant public funders, including BBSRC, Innovate UK and FSA. 

Who is this for?

Funding is available for current Food Safety Research Network members and must represent a collaboration between an academic lead applicant eligible to receive BBSRC funding AND at least one non-academic partner.

• Join the Food Safety Research Network for free

Multiple academic and non-academic partners are encouraged where it benefits the project. We would consider the introduction of a new partner to an existing collaboration to be within the scope of this call. The lead awardee must be from a UKRI-eligible organisation. They will receive the award and be responsible for the onward dispersal of any funding to partners, where relevant.

We have a very broad view on who can impact the safety of foods, and the Network welcomes project ideas from partnerships formed from across the food sector:

• from primary producers to distributors to retailers; and 
• academic researchers that have expertise in areas such as microbiology, data sciences, and social and economic sciences
• government and policy organisations that have roles in food regulation and the establishment and training on best practices
• consumer groups, charities, or non-government organisations.

Contact the Network management team for further information on eligibility.

What types of projects are we interested in?

The following activities will be funded through this Award:

Flexible Talent Mobility:

• Training opportunities – formal training that can help further your career development.
• Academia-industry exchanges
• Interdisciplinary academia-academia exchanges
• International exchanges
• Short-term placements (e.g. day releases)
• Longer-term placements (1-3 months)
• Secondments
• Placements with policymakers
• Technology transfer

Seeding projects:

• Characterisation studies – collecting and analysing consumer data to support future innovation-focused research projects and generating educational materials and other outcomes to support behavioural change.
• Feasibility trials – small-scale trials of potential solutions or food safety interventions to demonstrate the feasibility of an idea or approach.
• Proof of Concept studies – early-stage investigation of the suitability and potential benefits of a product, process, or service to demonstrate proof of concept.
• Capability building – pre-work, including acquisition of materials to enable preliminary trials, and development of techniques or technologies.
• Community building – studies, workshops, and consultation activities to understand industrial and regulatory needs and to identify opportunities and challenges.
• Demonstration activities – enabling potential users to understand the benefits of novel ideas, technologies or approaches. This could include initial product design, developing virtual demonstrations, mock-ups, and models.
• Partnership building – UK and International – activities to identify partners and visits to gather knowledge about current practices, potential interventions, and proposed management strategies.
• Business case development – gathering evidence to de-risk further investment in targeted translational activities for food safety.
• Undertaking initial desk-based market research – this could include early-stage user intelligence to de-risk future innovation-focused research.

Awards cannot be used to support:

• Generic translation activities or infrastructure.
• Patent filing or similar costs associated directly to registering intellectual property rights.
• Non-specific public engagement activities and science communication, as opposed to specific activities designed to have specific impact upon a specific public

How much and what resource is available in this round of applications? 

£70K is available in this call, and we anticipate funding a portfolio of awards of different sizes and scales, focused on a variety of opportunities.

Awards will be made at 100% full economic cost to the lead research organisation under standard UKRI research grant terms and conditions. All awards will be made, and funds distributed by Quadram Institute Bioscience (QIB) as coordinator of the Food Safety Research Network. To support the development of project ideas on a non-committal basis, it is acceptable that a notional budget (e.g. estimated total resource requirement) is included in the project application. If selected, detailed budgets will be required by 6 December 2024.

Funding requirements specific to this call are:

• Awards will be paid to the lead awardee in arrears at 100% FEC. The lead awardee will be responsible for disseminating funds to other partners on their award.
• Equipment (of any cost) is not an eligible cost.
• In-kind contributions are encouraged but not mandated from project members and should be described in the application form, with in-kind contributions expected for access to facilities, some staff time, and use of existing data sets and infrastructure.
• In all other regards, eligible costs align with usual BBSRC requirements. Please contact the Network management team to clarify the status of any costs if you are not sure.

How will applications be assessed? 

All applications will be assessed by a review panel comprising key stakeholders in the Network. The panel will consider each proposal’s strengths against three scoring criteria:

• Strategic fit – does the proposed activity align with the objectives of the call?
• Delivery – will the proposed approach efficiently and effectively deliver against its stated aims?
• Impact – will the project deliver a near-term and sustained impact that is aligned with the priorities of the call?

These criteria will be used to assess and determine proposals to be funded within the available budget for this call. We reserve the right to request further information from applicants to support decision making.

Timeline

The closing date for all applications is 17:00, 14 November 2024. Applications received after this time will not be considered.

The provisional date for the assessment decision is 25 November 2024. Applicants will be notified of the outcome of their applications soon after this date to enable awards to begin as soon as possible. All activities supported through this opportunity must conclude by 24 March 2025.

Reporting

All applicants will be required to complete a brief report detailing the outcomes and impact of their activities on conclusion. The anticipated reporting deadline is Friday 25 April 2025.

Given the constricted operational timelines, we will continue with a light-touch approach with sub-awardees and organise videoconferences during the project to discuss status of key project milestones, activities with partners, and project barriers. Nearer to the close of each project, we follow up with awardees to identify project highlights and possible impact narratives, for inclusion on the Research page of the FSRN website.