Cintech Agroalimentaire, with the support of several technology solution providers, has launched the FRESHI initiative to address a central challenge in the food industry: improving and predicting food shelf life within its packaging. This objective relies on the coordinated use of complementary levers, including cold-chain traceability using radiofrequency tags, antimicrobial or functional packaging, and data exploitation through artificial intelligence models.

These technological building blocks already exist, but their integration remains costly, complex, and rarely coordinated. Producers, retailers, and technology providers typically conduct trials independently, often in silos. This fragmentation leads to duplicated R&D efforts, high costs for partial validations, and slow industrial adoption of otherwise promising solutions.

FRESHI provides a collective response by pooling integration, validation, and modeling efforts within a structured, collaborative, and neutral framework. The initiative enables multiple complementary technologies to be deployed and evaluated simultaneously, allowing their combined effects to be measured under conditions representative of real industrial environments.

The initiative is structured to maximize collective impact and reduce individual risk through shared investment and coordinated validation efforts.

Beyond the funded project, FRESHI aims to become a national collaborative platform bringing together food producers, retailers, and technology solution providers. Its objective is to accelerate the validation of technologies capable of improving actual food shelf life, predicting its evolution over time, and supporting better operational decisions,particularly in logistics, merchandising, and loss reduction. This approach directly contributes to reducing food waste, improving product quality, and optimizing the agri-food value chain.

Cintech Agroalimentaire acts as the neutral coordinator and technical expert of the consortium. In this role, Cintech mobilizes its infrastructure, specialized teams, and expertise to carry out technological integrations, structure validation protocols, and develop predictive models applicable across the agri-food industry.

The initiative is grounded in the principle of simultaneous integrations. Rather than testing technologies one at a time,such as a single packaging solution, sensor, or predictive model,FRESHI deploys multiple heterogeneous technological components in parallel within a unified experimental framework. This approach makes it possible to observe cross-interactions, generate coherent and time-synchronized datasets, and reduce biases associated with fragmented testing.

Food shelf life results from the simultaneous interaction of multiple factors, including formulation, processing conditions, packaging properties, cold-chain performance, microbial environment, and logistics practices. To develop reliable predictive models, data must be collected concurrently, temporally aligned, and generated under realistic industrial conditions. Simultaneous and heterogeneous integrations are therefore a prerequisite for training, validating, and transferring robust predictive models at industrial scale.

This methodology also enables collective learning. Integrations benefit all consortium members, models improve as additional technologies and datasets are incorporated, and results become more rapidly transferable and exploitable across the industry.

To ensure the sustainability and impact of FRESHI, Cintech Agroalimentaire invites food producers to commit to the consortium for a three-year period. This commitment includes a financial contribution, as well as an in-kind contribution through internal resources such as staff time, access to equipment or production lines, participation in trials, and data sharing.

Producers may choose an annual commitment of $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000 for three years, accompanied by an in-kind contribution of comparable magnitude. Financial contributions are eligible for SR&ED treatment as subcontracting expenses, significantly reducing the net cost for participating organizations.

Early commitment is important to influence technological priorities, use cases, and modeling directions.

Meaning of the FRESHI Acronym

FRESHI stands for "Freshness Reconstituted through Ecosystemic, Simultaneous, Heterogeneous Integrations."

The name reflects the core ambition of the initiative: to restore and extend food freshness by integrating diverse technologies across the agri-food ecosystem, deploying them simultaneously, and validating their combined impact through data-driven, predictive models under real-world conditions.