BARCELONA | On 20 and 21 October, Barcelona became the meeting point for the newest generation of PRIMA projects.
Around 90 participants representing 60 projects from the 2024 and 2025 calls came together for two days of exchange, with one shared goal: to turn individual projects into a connected community.
Some teams are still shaping their first deliverables, the first demonstration activities, working through their initial results. That made for open, practical conversations about what works, what doesn’t, and what teams wish they had known at the start.
With the PRIMA ecosystem in the room
Project teams were joined by representants of the National Funding Agencies and the PRIMA Secretariat, reflecting the many actors who accompany projects from proposal to impact. Having them in the same room gave teams a direct line to those who shape and support the programme.
Overview of the programme:
Pitching your project in two minutes
Thirty projects that recently joined the PRIMA community took the stage, each with two minutes to present. The brief was clear: focus on the added value of what the project will do and on its expected impact. The session closed with a collective reflection on how to adapt a narrative to different audiences, and how to make sure listeners grasp the main point of a project in a very short time.
Congratulations to the projects SALSA and MED4CITRUS, the two projects who received the most votes for the Most Convincing Pitch!
Café Scientifique: 27 projects, one room
The poster exhibition gave the 2024 projects, which started between a year ago and more recently, the space to go into more detail on what they are about. Twenty-seven posters focused on Key Exploitable Results (KERs), the outcomes that can be turned into real-world applications, policy recommendations or further innovation. The format was designed to foster discussion and synergies, leaving room for teams simply to get to know each other.
Spotlight on two concluded projects
To show newcomers where a PRIMA project can end up, two concluded projects shared their experience: NEWFEED, led by the SME AZTI, and OURMed, led by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research.
OURMED: making the Mediterranean’s water challenges visible
What if you could see the Mediterranean’s water challenges, not just read about them? That is the question behind MEDWaterHUB, a new cloud-based platform initiated by OURMED. Its coordinator, Seifeddine Jomaa, presented the platform and in particular its Storytelling Mode, where the “water tales” come to life.
The reasoning is that raw datasets rarely change minds or shape policy on their own. A spreadsheet of groundwater measurements means little to a policymaker or a citizen unless it is translated into information they can understand and act on. MEDWaterHUB therefore pairs rigorous data with guided narratives that make complex environmental phenomena legible to non-specialists.
“As scientists, we should really understand the importance and power of storytelling. It should be part of project outputs. We need to understand its potential and utilize it,” said Seifeddine Jomaa.
He also pointed to the bigger picture behind the numbers: “Monitoring is essential and should integrate multiple data sources, including Earth Observation, to identify when a system is at risk. However, effective action also requires social readiness, supportive policy, and a financial sector that understands and responds to these risks and translates them into opportunities.”
NEWFEED: from food industry by-products to animal feed (https://newfeed-prima.eu/)
Monica Gutierrez presented NEWFEED, a project led by an SME that converts food industry by-products into high-value secondary animal feed ingredients through circular economy schemes. The project designed and demonstrated the feasibility of three circular processes, with the following results:
- Grape stem, for dairy sheep and cows: a 10% inclusion of the new ingredient in the diets caused no impairment of productive performance.
- Orange peel, for dairy sheep: ewes readily consumed the ingredient, and yoghurt taste scores did not differ.
- Fermented olive cake, for broilers: inclusion of 10–30%, supported by the tested herbal mixture, was viable.
The business opportunity is clear: a cheaper, more sustainable local feed ingredient built on a circular model. But Monica Gutierrez was equally candid about what it takes to move from results to a real business. Her main message to the newer projects was about continuity from day one.
“Our project’s continuity depends on a committed operator and a robust business case. Public funding can accelerate implementation, but it should not be what makes the project viable,” she said.
Finding suitable partners, including investment partners, has been the team’s biggest challenge, and letters of interest are now in place. The next steps are to secure investors and a third-party partner to launch and operate the business, guarantee consistent supply volumes while managing seasonality, hygiene, storage and collection logistics, and keep optimising costs to strengthen competitiveness. Trials have already shown that productive performance, including milk yield, was maintained, with scope for further improvement. Throughout, the guiding principle is shared value: every partner in the value chain must benefit economically.
Synergies in the making
By the end of the second day, conversations had turned into concrete ideas. Among the opportunities identified: joint events and webinars, shared use of demonstration sites, coordinated communication actions, common methodologies and data, ideas for future joint proposals. Some will take shape in the coming months; others are seeds for longer-term cooperation.
Looking ahead
PRIMA Project Day 2026 showed that the strength of the programme lies not only in the quality of individual projects but in the links between them. As the 2024 and 2025 projects move forward, the connections made in Barcelona are a starting point for a community that tackles Mediterranean water, food and agriculture challenges together.
