Competency centre for hygiene, health, and product safety

Green transition must go hand in hand with a high level of safety and hygiene

Companies in Denmark’s positions of strength: Life science and food production, are subject to high demands on methods and standards for safety, both in production environments and in vendors' value chain. These highly regulated industries are further challenged by their transition to a greener and more sustainable future through minimisation of  their resource and energy consumption without compromising product safety and hygiene, among others.

For the food industry, high food safety and veterinary health are prerequisites for domestic and international success alike. Sustainable food production is the extra dimension that can secure an international advantage for Danish foods. The challenge, however, is to achieve sustainable food production with energy and resource savings while maintaining a high level of hygiene and product safety.

For the life science and biotech industries, implementing new energy-saving technologies and processes for CO2 reduction in a set-up that is highly regulated, complex, and administratively taxing - and where consumer health and safety remains the top priority - is a challenge.

In this project, entitled "Competency centre for hygiene, health, and product safety" we will support the life science and food industries in combining a green transition with a continued high level of hygiene and product safety.

Competency centre to support sustainable production throughout the value chain

This project's ambition is to establish a multidisciplinary competency centre for hygiene, health, and product safety, where companies in the entire value chain of the food and pharmaceutical sector can get assistance with maintaining a high level of hygiene, health, and product safety in the context of a transition to a more sustainable production.

The competency centre will develop technological services and new resource-saving solutions that companies can implement while maintaining a high level of health and hygiene. This will be accomplished by testing new materials, investigating and testing optimisations in the cleaning process for hygiene-critical environments, and applying IoT and AI-based solutions to optimise hygiene and health in livestock herds and the production environment. 

We will contribute to developing healthy, safe, and sustainable solutions for:

• animal husbandry, to achieve reduced drug use and increased animal welfare, productivity, and sustainability, by extension
• businesses in food and pharmaceutical production, as well as large-scale kitchens in healthcare facilities, by achieving savings in water, chemicals, and energy through optimisation of the cleaning process, and in production equipment through design and optimisation of materials and surfaces for long lifetimes.

Life science, food, and healthcare sectors benefit from the competency centre

The project's beneficiaries are mainly livestock producers, the food and pharmaceutical industries, and the healthcare sector.

The food industry covers the whole supply and value chain from farm to table, with a particular focus on businesses in the livestock sector, such as poultry and pig farms, as well as the manufacturing sector's wide range of food producers.

In addition, the centre will benefit a secondary target group, including manufacturers of production equipment, manufacturers of products and technologies for optimising hygiene in production processes, consultants who among other things project new facilities, veterinarians, public authorities regulating this field, and so on.

The competency centre for hygiene, health, and product safety has set up a multidisciplinary networking group for professional discussions and dissemination of results twice a year.