CA 
ES 
EN 
FR 
Foodservice Cluster’s president, Raimon Bagó, Serhs Food General Director, aims to group in a single cluster the set of actors that are involved in the social and commercial restoration sector’s value chain to boost collaborative projects in the fields of food safety, personalized nutrition or sustainability.
The new cluster, which keeps the Foodservice name, groups more than eighty companies and it is one of the 29 entities that are part of the Cataluña Clusters de ACCIÓN program.
The cluster is currently working in the boost of projects to contribute to the fight against Covid-19 as the support to recuperate the restoration sector or the safety in restaurants.
The Catalan clusters Foodservice and Food N’Nutrition, specialized in the food and nutrition scopes, have merged in one entity with the aim of increasing the critical mass in the Catalonia sector and boost greater reach projects, as well as generating synergies and scale economies. This new entity is one of the 29 Catalan clusters that are part of the Cataluña Clusters de ACCIÓN program -the agency for the competitiveness of the company, under the Department of Enterprise and Knowledge-.
The new cluster, which will keep the Foodservice Cluster name, currently gathers more than eighty companies with the aim of unifying agents and actors involved in the value chain of the organized social and commercial restoration sector. According to Raimon Bagó “with this merge it is intended to increase the cluster’s potential within the food sector, integrating the different agents in a more vertical and representative entity, as well as optimizing resources with a more global strategy”. For Bagó, with this merge, “the restoration, along with health and nutrition, will incorporate a very important and complementary active that will bring a lot of added value to the cluster’s chain value”.
According to the director of the ACTION Cluster Unit, Joan Martí, “cluster mergers are positive when they allow gaining critical mass without losing strategic focus, as in this case”. According to Martí, “internationally, the beginning of a trend of merging clusters is observed, since in a complex global environment there is dimension to articulate impact projects”. “This trend has already started in Catalonia with the creation of the Catalionia Bio & HealthTeach cluster and now we already have two cases, and surely there will be more in the future”.
The objective of this merge is to share experiences and knowledge to boost new collaborative projects in the food and restoration scopes, in aspects such as food safety, personalized nutrition, ingredients development and functional foods or the improvement of the sector’s sustainability. In this way, the Foodservice Cluster’s activities for this 2020 will be organized based in six strategic axes: food safety, health and nutrition, digitalization, shared value, strategic change management, green, blue and circular economy, and the efficiency of human and productive resources on the farm.
In this way, currently, the new entity has focused on the boost of projects to contribute to the fight against Covid-19 from the food sector’s point of view, as is the case of an initiative to support the restoration sector as consequence of the crisis through advanced reservations or to promote safety in restaurants.
What is a cluster?
A cluster is a group of companies (startups, SMEs and multinationals) and surroundings agents (universities and technological centres) from a certain economic area that share resources, generate synergies and that project internationally. It is an instrument that improves competitiveness among members that are part from the development of joint transforming projects and the definition of strategic challenges for their sector. In Catalonia, the clusters represent the 30% of the GDP (74 billion euros of added billing) and generate more than 300.000 job positions.
Nowadays, 29 clusters are part of the Cataluña Clusters de ACCIÓN program, an initiative driven to accompany the Catalan clusters to help them focus their strategy, train the cluster managers, co-finance strategic projects and organize trips to reference ecosystems for international benchmarking and close collaborative projects among Catalan clusters or international entities, among other initiatives.
