NP/EFSA/MESE/2023/01 Investigating technological processing supporting the assessment of novel proteins in food and feed risk assessment

• Budget: 100.000 €
• Approximate launch date: April 2023
• Deadline to register interest: 21/04/2023

Background:

In the European Union (EU), the safety of (novel) proteins is routinely evaluated in various regulated areas of the food and feed chain, more particularly in the regulatory risk assessments of products such as Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), novel foods, enzymes, food/feed additives or pesticides. As part of the risk assessment, EFSA evaluates the safety of the production process used in the manufacture of the product under assessment, including e.g., information on raw materials and processing aids, processing steps and operational conditions, safety assurance measures and the potential impact on e.g. composition, presence of undesirable substances, nutritional value and metabolism.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has published a series of documents for the safety assessment of GM foods and feeds of plant origin, which are considered during the risk assessment by EFSA. These documents include processing steps to produce various plant-derived products. However, the OECD documents are limited to certain product categories, and therefore to the associated production processes. For example, the document for rapeseed (OECD, 2011)  did not consider rapeseed protein isolate and rapeseed powder production, which both have been assessed as novel foods by the EFSA NDA Panel in 2013  and 2020 , respectively.

In the framework of the novel food regulation, novel aspects of the production process should also be characterised when that has not been used for food production within the EU before 15 May 1997, and causes a significant impact on the product (considered as a novel food).

On this background, EFSA is devoting additional resources to map the types of protein-rich food and feed products and the associated processing technologies and operational conditions, and to assess whether/how processing affects the proteins present in the raw commodity (e.g. degradation, denaturation, aggregation or interactions with the food matrix, e.g. Maillard reactions). This information on the fate of proteins following processing of the raw commodities will support the risk assessment with regards to potential hazards and providing information relevant for the hazard assessment and exposure considerations.

Objectives:

The objectives of the contract resulting from this procurement procedure are as follows:

1. To map food and feed products containing protein used either as whole foods or as ingredients, produced from:
   1. the main GM crops (including maize, soybean, rapeseed, cotton, sugar beet, camelina, rice, potato).
   2. plants, animals or microorganisms falling under the NF Regulation or recognised as novel feed. Particularly the following sources shall be considered: insects, plant-based proteins (e.g. water lentils, pulses), microalgae, protein-rich microbial biomass, fermentation-derived proteins.
2. To map the processes, the processing steps, the purpose of the process/ processing steps and the range for operational conditions (such as time, temperature, pressure, solvent type/concentration etc.) applied to the above-mentioned products. Known/well-established processing technologies (such as conventional heating, extruding, fermentation, filtering, hydrolysis etc.), but also innovative ones should be included when having market potential.
3. To discuss the differences between the processing technologies, processing steps and operational conditions from objective 2 applied to GM crops compared to the ones already proposed in the OECD consensus documents for GM crops.
4. To discuss the impact of processing on protein safety regarding toxicology, immunotoxicity, allergenicity, nutrition, digestibility, GIT microbiome of the host for the food and feed products identified in objective 1. The discussion should consider the specific needs of EFSA i.e. risk assessment of food and feed safety and include a list of known manifestations. It is noted that the effect of the intended food/feed matrix (e.g. interactions with particular food components, the effect of pH, ionic strength) should be considered in the discussion.

Selection criteria - Technical and professional capacity:

Requirement 1: Professional capacity (overall at organisational level):

The tenderer overall must have extensive and demonstrable experience in in literature searches (systematic review) and evaluations, extracting and summarising scientific data/information both narratively and in tabular formats, in drafting scientific documents/articles related to the topic and in using office IT tools.

Requested evidence:

• A list of three major projects or publications related to the subject matter of this contract, carried out in the course of the past 5 years.

Requirement 2: Professional capacity:

The tenderer must have the ability to provide a team of at least 3 scientists compliant with these minimum expertise requirements:

• One scientist with at least 5 years of experience in conducting Systematic Reviews
• One scientist with at least 5 years of experience with knowledge on food/feed processing
• One scientist with at least 5 years of experience food/feed risk assessment to support Objective 4

Requested evidence:

• Detailed CVs of the Project team members proposed for the assignment.
• Tenderers should also provide a one-page summary of the names of the individual Project team members and the profiles covered.

Requirement 3: Professional capacity: English language capacity of each team member individually

Requirements:

The team of experts must have individually an excellent level of spoken and written English. For non-native speakers, this should be demonstrated by an Official certificate of English proving a C1 level OR at least 3 years of work or study in an English-speaking environment or by proof of (co)authorship of at least 5 scientific publications and/or reports in English language.

Requested evidence:

• Detailed CVs of the Project team members proposed for the assignment, where it is clearly indicated how the English requirement is met.
• Official certificate of English proving a C1 level where applicable.

Requirement 4: Technical capacity: overall at organisational level

Requirements:

The tender must have the following minimum technical capacity to perform the contract:

• Access to Web of Sciences, Pubmed and Citation manager software that is compatible with EndNoteTM.

Requested evidence:

• A statement confirming access to the above.

If you are interested in this procedure please send an email within the deadline to efsaprocurement [at] efsa.europa.eu (EFSAprocurement[at]efsa[dot]europa[dot]eu) quoting the reference of the procedure and specifying the following:

• your name/organisation’s name and address.
• whether you participate as a physical person or an organisation/private company.