Gro­ceries are not only essen­tial (hence the title essen:tiell, derived from „Essen” = food, eat and „essen­tiell” = essen­tial) to pro­vide nutri­tion but their pro­duc­tion is also an impor­tant part of the Upper Aus­tri­an economy.

Sim­i­lar to oth­er indus­tries, the food indus­try faces con­stant changes. Culi­nary glob­al­i­sa­tion, chang­ing nutri­tion­al pat­terns and new food trends, (bio)technological inno­va­tions and changes in leg­is­la­tion and mar­ket­ing strate­gies make only an incom­plete list.
To iden­ti­fy and dis­cuss the present and future chal­lenges for Upper Austria’s food pro­duc­ers, ACADEMIA SUPERIOR held this con­fer­ence at the fit­ting loca­tion of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Applied Sci­ences of Upper Aus­tria, Cam­pus Wels, which offers a new field of study called „Food tech­nol­o­gy”, in coop­er­a­tion with the Upper Aus­tri­an Food Clus­ter and the Upper Aus­tri­an Min­is­ters for Agri­cul­ture, Max Hiegels­berg­er, and Econ­o­my, Dr. Michael Strugl.

The inputs from the first day’s lec­tures and dis­cus­sions and the find­ings from the sec­ond day’s work­shops on three aspects of the top­ic were pub­lished in a 36-page report, which is avail­able for down­load (Ger­man only) in the sec­tion „Pub­li­ca­tions” of this website.