Four decades after its founding in 1981, the National Centre for Food Technology and Safety (CNTA) has developed a specific offering for the fresh fruit and vegetable sector built around three complementary pillars: producing more efficiently, developing higher added-value products, and turning surpluses and by-products into new business opportunities. Several CNTA experts sum up the center's current identity with a formula that captures that journey: CNTA is "a technology partner for the agri-food industry" that has evolved in step with companies that have themselves been profoundly transformed over the same period.

CNTA explains that its value lies in connecting scientific knowledge with industrial application, so that a company can be supported from the moment it identifies a challenge through to developing and validating a solution, whether that involves food quality and safety, new products, process optimization, sustainability, or the adoption of new technologies.

The center also plays a bridging role within the broader ecosystem, where innovation increasingly demands collaboration between companies, technology centers, startups, and public authorities. CNTA positions itself as that bridge "so that knowledge and technology ultimately become solutions that can genuinely reach the market."

Four fronts for the safety of fresh fruit and vegetables
"The fresh produce sector occupies," they acknowledge, "a prominent and highly cross-cutting position in both the food quality and safety axis and the technological innovation axis." On the safety side, the center identifies a first challenge in residue and contaminant control, compounded by global supply chains, multiple destination markets, and demanding regulatory requirements, alongside microbiological risk, which is particularly sensitive in products consumed fresh or minimally processed and which, they note, "requires a preventive approach throughout the entire process rather than limiting control to analysis of the finished product."

A further front involves ensuring that safety, quality, and shelf life advance together, since microbiological, sensory, and physicochemical deterioration determines how long a product can retain its quality and safety intact, which is why the center approaches shelf-life studies from all three dimensions.

From computer vision to packaging that reduces waste
That drive to anticipate problems explains the push to move from conventional analysis towards control that is "faster, digital, and predictive," one of the areas where the center sees the greatest potential. CNTA works with imaging technologies such as NIR and hyperspectral sensing, combined with advanced data analytics, to develop models capable of characterizing quality and detecting certain deviations quickly and, in some cases, non-destructively. The center has a modular computer vision platform for the analytical control of plant-based products, as well as NIR models applied to quality parameters in mango and avocado.

"For tomato, pepper, and other greenhouse vegetables," CNTA stresses, "the focus is on building models specific to each challenge and product, because the key is to combine technology, data, and models that are properly validated for each application."

On packaging, the approach starts from the product-process-packaging system as a whole, since, as the center argues, reducing material or replacing it with something apparently more sustainable "is not enough if doing so compromises safety, quality, or shelf life," a risk that would ultimately generate more food waste. This is why CNTA researches both the optimization of processing and packaging and the development of new materials and food coatings, studying their interaction with the food and their effect on storage, supported by pilot plants equipped with technologies such as flow-pack and heat sealing.

"The goal," they explain, "is to find the balance between lower packaging impact, maximum food protection, and less waste," while companies and the center are also working intensively on a new front: the European packaging regulation.

Combined hurdles and new products
On preservation, CNTA argues that the future does not lie in a single technology but in the intelligent combination of different hurdles, selected according to the product and the objective. There is potential in both packaging systems and coatings, as well as in technologies capable of reducing treatment intensity while better preserving sensory and nutritional characteristics. The center has evaluated thermal alternatives such as flash pasteurization and radio frequency in products made from fruit and vegetables, aimed at reconciling safety and shelf life with less impact on the product. This work is complemented by experience with non-thermal technologies, including the stabilization of apple and orange juices using ultrasound and high hydrostatic pressure.

Environmental sustainability: water and waste
Within its environmental sustainability service, the center acknowledges that it is difficult to rank the requests it receives from fresh produce companies, but lists the needs it addresses with them: water use management and minimization, water footprint calculation, environmental information labeling, implementation of management systems such as ISO 14001 and IFS ESG Check, and food waste prevention and reduction plans.

"In the fresh produce sector," they add, "promoting surpluses, discards, and by-products carries particular weight, because there is an opportunity to turn those streams into ingredients, products, or new sources of value through extraction, fermentation, or other technologies."

Mercamadrid: proximity as a strategy
The center's expansion with a new technical facility at Mercamadrid responds, as they put it, to a simple idea: "proximity." From these premises, which will allow CNTA to get closer to companies in the central and southern regions of Spain and provide more direct access to its technological capabilities and specialist knowledge, the center will carry out activities in innovation, food quality and safety, process improvement, and sensory analysis. The facility will also serve as a gateway to the full range of CNTA specialists.

The center considers the location particularly valuable given its direct connections with manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and other supply chain actors, an environment that, in their view, should make it easier to identify needs, develop collaborative projects, and transfer technology.

For more information:
CNTA
Crta-Na134-km 53. San Adrian. 31570. Navarra
T. +34 948 670 159
[email protected]