Case Study

EIT Food: Building an End-to-End EU Grant Lifecycle Platform on Salesforce

At a Glance

EIT Food is a European Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC) that funds and manages a portfolio of innovation projects across the European Union (EU) food system. Its complex, multi-stakeholder grant lifecycle demanded an equally sophisticated, end-to-end grants management solution.

Vera Solutions designed and built a comprehensive grants management platform on Salesforce, spanning the full project lifecycle from initial award application and evaluation, through partner onboarding, cost reporting, and deliverable submission, to EU compliance reporting.

The result is a unified system that brings together EIT Food’s project and finance teams, as well as grantees, replacing fragmented manual processes with automated workflows, structured approvals, and real-time portfolio visibility.

Who is EIT Food?

EIT Food is one of Europe’s largest and most impactful Knowledge and Innovation Communities, established by the European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT) and co-funded by the European Union. Its mission is to make the food system more sustainable, innovative, and trustworthy by connecting a network of universities, research centers, businesses, entrepreneurs, and civil society organizations.

EIT Food funds and manages a diverse portfolio of innovation projects, distributing grants to partner organizations across the continent and requiring rigorous, EU-mandated reporting on outcomes, deliverables, budgets, and key performance indicators (KPIs). The scale and complexity of its programs, including hundreds of active projects and their external participants (grant recipients), along with strict EU compliance requirements, make robust grants management infrastructure essential.

The Challenges

When Vera Solutions first engaged with EIT Food, the organization was operating a highly complex grants management cycle with limited system support. As an intermediary funder accountable to the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (an EU body with prescriptive, XML-formatted reporting requirements), EIT Food needed to collect, structure, and submit financial and programmatic data to an exacting standard. At the same time, it had to support dozens of external partner organizations in reporting their own costs and deliverables, all within a multi-stage, internally governed approval process.

The absence of a unified, purpose-built system meant that critical processes spanning grant applications, project monitoring, cost reporting, and document generation were fragmented across manual workflows, disconnected tools, and workarounds that could not scale. The organization had a Salesforce environment, but it was partially built and inconsistently adopted, with pockets of functionality configured by previous partners that lacked cohesion or documentation.

Key challenges included:

Disconnected grants lifecycle management: the application, evaluation, project execution, and reporting phases lived in disconnected systems, making it difficult to track program outcomes across the portfolio.
Manual, error-prone cost reporting: partner finance contacts lacked a structured, self-service mechanism to report itemized costs incurred against annual budgets, requiring significant manual coordination by EIT Food staff.
No real-time deliverable or KPI progress visibility: project and grant teams lacked real-time insight into the status of partner deliverables and KPI achievement, relying on email exchanges and ad hoc data collection.
Complex, unautomated document generation: the production of application snapshots, award letters, contracts, and cost statements was manual and time-consuming, with no systematic link between Salesforce data and formal documentation.
EU compliance reporting bottleneck: EIT Food’s primary funder (EIT) requires data in a highly specific XML format, generated via an ETL tool (Workato), making the quality and completeness of Salesforce data directly critical to compliance.
Fragmented approval workflows: budget and project change requests, deliverable submissions, and monitoring report sign-offs, each followed inconsistent processes with limited automation or audit trail.

The Solution

To address these challenges, Vera Solutions developed a purpose-built platform on Salesforce covering every stage of EIT Food’s grant lifecycle, from award to reporting.

Key solution components included:

Grant lifecycle foundation: Vera implemented Amp Impact, including the Amp Impact Grants Management plugin, providing EIT Food with a structured architecture to track projects, organizations, budgets, deliverables, and KPIs across all program phases.
External user portals: Two Salesforce Experience Cloud portals were built for distinct audiences: myEITFood, which handles both partner self-registration and grantee project management and reporting, and the Evaluation Hub for application review.
Multi-period cost reporting: A structured interactive automation allows external finance contacts to log itemized costs against budget lines, with automated routing to EIT Food’s compliance manager and sequential sign-off.
Comprehensive reporting architecture: Five custom reporting period types (Budget Planning, Cost Report, Technical Report, Use of Resources Report, and Monitoring Report) each drive its own workflows and data collection requirements across the project portfolio.
Program oversight workflows: A custom Progress object captures point-in-time snapshots of KPI, deliverable, and budget status, underpinning structured submission and approval workflows for deliverables and monitoring reports.
Document automation: PDF Butler automates the generation of application snapshots, award letters, contracts, and cost statements directly from live Salesforce data via SOQL-powered Word templates.
Change request management: A two-track system handles budget change requests (with a four-level sequential approval chain) and non-budget changes such as KPI adjustments and no-cost extensions.
EU compliance reporting: The Salesforce data model was structured to support Workato ETL extraction, converting Salesforce data into the specific XML format required by EIT Food’s EU funder.

The Results:

The Vera-built platform has transformed how EIT Food manages its own grant portfolio. Where processes were once manual, disconnected, and difficult to audit, the organization now operates a single source of truth that supports internal staff, external partners, project monitors, and compliance teams alike.

Key outcomes:

End-to-end grants lifecycle on a single platform: EIT Food can now manage the full project journey, from application and evaluation through to cost reporting, deliverable submission, and EU compliance reporting, within a unified Salesforce environment.

External partner self-service: Partner finance teams and activity leaders access structured, guided interfaces through the grantee portal, reducing the coordination burden on EIT Food staff and improving data quality at source.

External partner self-service: Partner finance teams and activity leaders access structured, guided interfaces through the grantee portal, reducing the coordination burden on EIT Food staff and improving data quality at source.
Structured financial governance: Multi-level approval workflows for cost reports and budget change requests ensure that financial decisions are tracked, authorized, and auditable at every stage.
Real-time program visibility: The grants team has a consolidated view of monitoring report progress, deliverable status, KPI achievement, and budget utilization across the full project portfolio.

Scalable EU compliance reporting: The Salesforce data architecture supports Workato ETL extraction, making funder-mandated XML reporting a routine, reliable process rather than a manual compliance effort.
Ongoing managed services partnership: Following the implementation, EIT Food transitioned to a Vera managed services engagement, enabling the organization to continue evolving its system with ongoing support, bug resolution, and incremental feature development.

“We have been partnering with Vera Solutions for many years now. Vera has always been on our side as we were maturing our business and business processes. They supported us to implement core processes in Salesforce/Amp Impact, helping our team to reach operation excellence, strong grant and project management and deliver and showcase material impact on the food system. Their understanding of what matters to EIT Food, our Partners, Impact and Funding, is key to our success. Working with Vera over multiple years, we were able to prioritise together releases thoughtfully — enhancing the system incrementally as our users learned and grew more comfortable with it.”

– Raphael Debleser, COO, EIT Food