Fish plays an important role in healthy eating of the European consumers. Several European fish species are traditional foods and are essential of the cultural heritage of the European society. To strengthen the traditional freshwater aquaculture in Europe and to assure the diversity of traditional food in European markets, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that are producing and processing traditional food fish must extend their skills in business development and production techniques.

The sub-network “Traditional Products of Fish” of TRAFOON aims at supporting SMEs that are producing traditional foods made of freshwater fish in Central-Eastern Europe. In order to do so, TRAFOON interlinks researchers, knowledge transfer agents, and SME associations from the Czech Republic, Poland, Belgium, Ireland, and Germany to foster sustainable innovation transfer and entrepreneurship in the sector of traditional foods for the benefit of Europe.
Based on an inventory of needs in the first year, a range of training activities for SMEs and food researchers are developed:

• 4 training workshops in 2 European countries (Czech Republic, Poland) will be performed including innovations in raw material production, food processing, food safety, certification, labelling, packaging, marketing and entrepreneurship (additional information in the TRAFOON project website)
• The open access web-based Information-Shop will publish all the transferred innovations

These activities will increase the interaction of research and food SMEs to identify gaps of innovations, to develop future research projects and to collectively form a future strategic and innovation agenda for the European traditional food sector