The food-processing industry in India plays a vital role in the national economic development and has potential to meet the local needs and export. It helps in processing agricultural products such as field crops, pulses, horticultural crops, livestock and fisheries. This can create employment opportunities for increasing labour force and sustaining the livelihood of households in rural areas.

There is a need for improving the capacity of the food-units to harness backward linkages with agriculture and allied activities in order to efficiently convert part of the output to value added products acceptable to the domestic and international markets. This would generate employment opportunities for different types of skills through food processing, packaging, grading and distribution.

Micro- food processing units, need intensive hand holding support for skill training, entrepreneurship, technology, credit and marketing, across the value chain, necessitating active participation of the both state and central governments.

CSIR-CFTRI has been supporting entrepreneurs in terms of Technology Transfer, Skill Development and Hand holding etc. In fact under PM FME scheme, as the State Level Technical Institution of the State, the Institute has been involved in the training of Master Trainers, Training of Trainees, Farmers/FPOs etc. Further, the need has been felt for sharing proper information on Food processing Machineries. Accordingly, a B2B portal has been created in order to facilitate reliable information to prospective & budding entrepreneurs. We are trying to reach all the machinery manufacturers across the country to upload their diverse machinery into the database. With a simple registration process, the users would be able to get access to the information. CSIR-CFTRI can play an enabler role in empowering emerging startups and entrepreneurs in this sector. This would supplement our clientbase along with other digital platforms such as SMECorner, FreeTech Portal and so on.