LIVING LAB IN THE HEART OF THE MEDITERRANEAN
Traditional knowledge embodies an inestimable heritage of understanding and interpretation of the environment for sustainable management, which has survived millennia of development and has been strengthened thanks to the blending of cultures that have traveled the roads and sailed in the waters of the Mare Nostrum.
The Mediterranean Diet Ecosystem Development Lab was created to safeguard this heritage and bring innovation to allow this set of knowledge to flourish in the future, so that they are the starting point for sustainable development in the Mediterranean.
Led by the integral ecological approach, the mission is to generate prosperity through the empowerment of a new entrepreneurial culture based on cooperation and regeneration.
The Campus hosts an incubator, hackathons, and acceleration programs co-organized together with the a global network of Future Food Institute’s partners.
Focus Areas
Ecosystem
Regeneration - Food & Environment
Regenerative agriculture, sustainable fishing, and farming
Blue Economy
Biodiversity Enhancement
Valorization of water resources
Circular Economy
Community
Smart Living - Tourism & Lifestyle
Climate-smart living
Hospitality & Sustainable Tourism
Repopulation of Italian villages and rural areas through the prototyping of services to facilitate the use of the territory
Valorization of the UNESCO heritage
Individual
Health & Heritage - Mediterranean Diet
The laboratory of research and experimentation on:
anthropological research
nutritional value, longevity, microbiome
product development
Promotion and diffusion of mediterranean diet ethos and traditions

The Mediterranean Lab was born as a spinoff of the Food Alchemist Lab, a research and development laboratory that supports industry in the research, creation, and prototyping of healthy and sustainable products, serving as a capillary arm for research and development in the Mediterranean.
In this way, thanks also to the collaborations between the various laboratories that will be set up in the ecosystem of the Paideia Campus in Pollica, it will be a real hub for research, innovation, and the creation of a community around the long-forgotten Traditional Ecological Knowledge, to promote the consumption and sustainable production of food in the Mediterranean area, planting its roots in an ancestral conception of the environment.
The laboratory focuses on research and experimentation on Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the Mediterranean area, to regenerate ancestral traditions that contain the understanding related to the production and processing of a healthy and sustainable food product, to make them accessible to the general public through the design of new/old products and innovation of the production process. It will also study how, in order to develop products dense in micronutrients, it is necessary to link the transformation process with the production process.
Areas of research:
- anthropological research
- nutritional value, longevity, microbiome
- product development