Circular Bioeconomy and Sustainable Animal Nutrition for Functional Food Production

Our research focuses on developing innovative and sustainable animal nutrition strategies that contribute to circular bioeconomy objectives, resource efficiency, improved animal production systems and enhanced quality of animal-derived foods.

Main areas of expertise and potential collaboration:

• Circular animal nutrition and agro-food by-product valorisation: Development of innovative feed ingredients from fruit and vegetable processing residues, oilseed press cakes and other agricultural side-streams, reducing waste while creating added value for livestock production.

• Natural bioactive compounds and functional feed additives: Identification, characterisation and application of polyphenols, natural antioxidants, carotenoids, tocopherols and polyunsaturated fatty acids to improve nutritional efficiency, antioxidant status and product quality.

• Innovative feed ingredient processing and delivery systems: Development and evaluation of stabilised and encapsulated bioactive ingredients, including approaches designed to protect sensitive compounds and improve their availability.

• Sustainable livestock production: Nutritional strategies for poultry and other farm animals aimed at improving feed utilisation, animal performance, health-related indicators and the environmental sustainability of production.

• Functional animal-derived foods: Nutritional approaches to enhance the fatty acid profile, antioxidant composition, oxidative stability, nutritional value and technological quality of meat, eggs and milk.

• Food and feed quality and safety: Comprehensive analytical characterisation of feed materials and animal products, including nutritional composition, minerals, fatty acids, bioactive compounds, antioxidant capacity and lipid oxidation.

• Bioaccessibility and functional evaluation: Application of in vitro digestion models and experimental approaches to investigate the stability, release and potential bioaccessibility of bioactive compounds.

Research infrastructure and capabilities

INCDBNA–IBNA Balotești offers multidisciplinary expertise and research infrastructure supporting feed formulation and production, controlled animal feeding trials, laboratory-scale ingredient development and advanced chemical and nutritional analyses.

Available capabilities include experimental animal facilities, pilot-scale feed production, chromatography-based analyses (HPLC and GC), mineral determination, spectrophotometric assays, evaluation of oxidative stability, and meat and egg quality assessment.

Expected collaborative activities

We are interested in joining or developing international consortia addressing sustainable feed systems, circular use of biomass, reduction of agro-food waste, innovative bio-based ingredients, sustainable livestock production and improved nutritional quality of animal-derived foods.

Our institute can contribute to proposal development, feed ingredient characterisation, experimental design, in vivo feeding trials, laboratory analyses, product quality assessment, data interpretation and dissemination of scientific results.

Partnership sought

We welcome collaboration with universities, research institutes, feed and food companies, agricultural organisations, technology developers and other stakeholders across Europe.

We are particularly interested in participating as a research and experimental validation partner in Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Actions (RIA) and Innovation Actions (IA), while also exploring opportunities for co-developing project concepts and contributing to multidisciplinary consortia.

Our objective is to translate circular bioeconomy principles into practical, scientifically validated nutritional solutions for more sustainable livestock production and higher-quality animal-derived foods.