The researchers who make up the consortium behind the Life MCUBO European project chose the University of Navarra’s Technology Campus as the backdrop for their latest meeting, in which they shared the advances made on reducing water use in the food industry and discussed future plans.

The expectation is that by decreasing the food industry’s consumption of this vital resource, not only will the industry minimize its environmental impact but it will also reduce costs and see greater efficiency in production.

The meeting’s organizers highlighted the project’s high value proposition potential when the different parts—monitoring, modeling and improvement—are implemented as a whole. The suite of tools developed by the project will allow companies to collect data on their water and energy consumption within 5 hours of installing the monitoring equipment, run simulations using mathematical models that are developed from the data collected, and test a planned improvement in a pilot plant before implementing it in a real environment.

The project, with a total budget of € 911,747, is currently being duplicated in companies similar to the three companies in which it was demonstrated. To date, 17 measurement and improvement campaigns have been carried out in 12 companies in three different autonomous communities in Spain: the Basque Country, Navarra and La Rioja.