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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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