Català 
Español 
The Catalan Foodservice and Food N’Nutrition clusters, specialized in the field of food and nutrition, have been integrated into a single entity with the aim of increasing the critical mass of the sector in Catalonia and promoting larger projects, as well as generate synergies and economies of scale. This new entity is one of the 29 Catalan clusters that form part of the ACCIÓ program Catalunya Clústers – the agency for the company’s competitiveness, depending on the Department of Business and Knowledge.
The new cluster, which will retain the name Foodservice Cluster, currently brings together more than eighty companies with the aim of uniting the different agents and actors involved throughout the value chain of the organized social and commercial restaurant sector. According to the president of Foodservice Cluster and General Manager of Serhs Food, Raimon Bagó, “this merger aims to increase the potential of the cluster within the food sector, integrating the different agents in a much more vertical and representative entity, as well as optimizing resources in a more global strategy ”. For Bagó, with this integration, “the restoration will incorporate with nutrition and health a very important and complementary asset that will provide much added value to the value chain of the cluster.”
According to the director of the ACCIÓ Cluster Unit, Joan Martí, “cluster mergers are positive when they allow to gain too much criticism without losing strategic focus, as in this case“. According to Martí, “at the international level, the beginning of a trend of merging clusters is observed, as in a complex global environment, a dimension is needed to articulate impact projects“. “In Catalonia, this trend began with the creation of the CataloniaBio & HealthTech cluster and now we have two cases and there will surely be more in the future” he said.
The aim of this merger is to share experiences and knowledge to promote new collaborative projects in the field of food and catering, in aspects such as food safety, personalized nutrition, the development of ingredients and functional or improving the sustainability of the sector. In this way, the activities of the Foodservice Cluster for 2020 will be organized based on six strategic axes: food security, nutrition and health, digitization, shared value, strategic change management, the green economy, blue economy and circular economy, and the efficiency of human and productive resources in exploitation.
In this sense, currently, the new entity has focused on promoting projects to contribute to the fight against covid-19 from the point of view of the food sector as is the case of an initiative to support the sector of catering as a result of the crisis through advance bookings or to promote security in restaurants.
