Tomapaint Built an EIC Accelerator Tomato-Peel Plant; Sales Lag

Every tin of tomatoes is lined with a lacquer that keeps the metal from reacting with the food, and most of those lacquers are made from petrochemicals. In the library of SSICA, the Italian public research station for the canning industry in Parma, Angela Montanari came across the proceedings of a 1942 conference describing a varnish made from tomato skins, she told Think4Food in 2019. The resin in question is cutin, the natural polyester that waterproofs the skin of the fruit. After research in three EU projects, she founded Tomapaint in March 2019 with Tommaso Barbieri and the brothers Stefano and Alessandro Chiesa, according to the company's own history and Tomato News.

A year later the European Innovation Council picked the company in the Green Deal round of the EIC Accelerator pilot. The Commission's list of selected companies for the 19 May 2020 cut-off names "Tomapaint srl" of Parma, project TOMAPAINT, with "blended finance", and names no other beneficiary for the project. The grant agreement, signed on 23 October 2020, gave the company €2,091,638.50 towards a €2,988,055 project to build an industrial plant, according to CORDIS. The plant was built. The market the company promised the EU has not followed at anything like the planned scale.

Where Tomapaint Stands Now

Tomapaint is a registered, active limited company. The EU's VAT register VIES confirms the VAT number as valid for "TOMAPAINT SRL" at Via Roma 4 in Sant'Ilario d'Enza, the same registered address that CORDIS lists. The business register summary published by the credit agency CRIBIS on informazione-aziende.it marks the company "Attiva", classes it as a maker of organic basic chemicals (ATECO 20.14), puts it at the plant address in Canneto sull'Oglio and says its latest filed accounts, for 2024, show revenue in the range "less than 300,000 euros". The same page says revenue grew compared with 2022 and that share capital was unchanged; it does not give the figures. The address listed differs by source: the company website gives Sant'Ilario d'Enza as registered office and Canneto sull'Oglio as operational site, while the regional start-up register EmiliaRomagnaStartUp gives an office in Parma.

The company is still communicating. The content API of its website shows that its home page, its "What we do" page and its EU projects page were last edited on 4 May 2026, according to the page records, and the home page now leads with paper packaging rather than cans. In April 2025 Barbieri told the podcast bioCIRCULAR LOOP that the facility had a 500-ton capacity and that the company was "actively seeking investment" to expand. Its investment page invites investors and licensees. No funding round has been announced.

The Technology: Cutin From Tomato Skins

The tomato processing industry produces peels, seeds and fibres that are mostly fed to animals, spread on fields or sent to biogas. Tomapaint's process, as described in the CORDIS report and on the company's process page, separates the skins by flotation, cooks them in an alkaline solution, centrifuges the liquid, precipitates the cutin with acid and centrifuges it out again. No organic solvents are used, and the exhausted peels go to biogas. The company says the cutin makes up 50 to 70% of its lacquer.

The selling point for cans is what the resin does not contain. Can coatings are among the food contact materials in which the EU has now banned bisphenol A (BPA), according to the Food Packaging Forum, and the company's product page presents cutin as a natural substitute for oil-based lacquers that can expose consumers to BPA, while Tomato News reported in 2019 that it runs on standard production lines "without any modification". Its test page describes a trial in which 50 kg of lacquer were applied on an industrial line and about 3,000 three-piece cans were filled with pulses, tomato and meat and stored for two years, with results "comparable to those of standard lacquers". The page notes that these results were obtained in the earlier EU projects, before the company existed. No independent publication of the pack test has been found.

The chemistry has been published. CORDIS lists four conference papers from the project with the University of Ferrara, on polyester-urethane coatings and corrosion protection for steel and aluminium, and a 2024 paper in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering on biobased poly(ester-urethane) coatings from tomato by-products lists Montanari with a Tomapaint affiliation. CORDIS records one patent application, numbered 14 750228 and dated 11 August 2014, for the extraction method, and an EU trademark registration from November 2019.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The project ran from 1 November 2020 to 31 October 2022 under the EIC Accelerator pilot's Green Deal topic. Its objective started from a batch pilot plant with a capacity of 12 tons of cutin a year. The plan was to build an industrial plant and raise output to "50 t/yr by 2021, 100t/yr by 2022, 200t/yr by 2023", eventually 500 tons; to grow the business to "€19.25M annual revenue" from bioresin sales; and to sign "licensing agreements for plants internationally". The company's project page describes an initial plant of 200 tons a year, scalable to 500 tons in 2024 and 1,500 tons in 2029, and a lacquer for metal food cans as the market entry.

The final report says the company "designed, built and assembled a new plant" in Canneto sull'Oglio, with a continuous process and real-time quality monitoring, which now "has a capacity to produce 500t of cutin". The same report says "approximately 7 tons of cutin have been produced" and used for application tests in metal and paper packaging, cosmetics and agriculture, and that the company expected its 2023 order book to be complete by the end of 2022. The Lamberti press release of November 2023, published on Tomapaint's website, says the plant was "fully operational" and built in 2022 with the EIC funds. The capacity figure differs by source: EmiliaRomagnaStartUp gives 200 tons a year.

1. Continuous industrial extraction plantDeliveredBuilt in Canneto sull'Oglio in 2022, per the CORDIS report and the Lamberti release.
2. Tests in other sectorsDeliveredApplication notes for wood, homecare and cosmetics on CORDIS; paper coating partnership with Lamberti.
3. Output of 100 tons in 2022 and 200 tons in 2023Not achievedAbout 7 tons in the project; no later output figure published.
4. Bio-lacquer launched for metal food cansNot achievedNo can or lacquer maker has been announced as a customer.
5. International plant licencesNot achievedNone announced; the company still invites licensees.
6. €19.25M annual revenueNot achieved2024 revenue under €300,000, per the filed accounts.

The project was completed on schedule, and the hardware the grant paid for exists. What did not follow was the business case attached to it: a plant presented as able to make hundreds of tons a year produced about 7 tons in its first two years, and no sales volume has been published since.

What Tomapaint Has Achieved Since the Award

The clearest commercial step is in paper, not cans. In November 2023 Lamberti, a specialty chemicals group based in Gallarate, and Tomapaint announced "an expansion of their ongoing collaboration" to industrialise a fully bio-based waterborne coating for paper and board made from tomato cutin, according to the joint press release. In March 2024 Lamberti's Esacote BIO BC 100, "extracted from the tomato peels through an innovative patented process", won the Innovative Materials category of the Avant-Garde awards at Packaging Première in Milan, and Lamberti staff described the cutin dispersion's barrier performance in PCI Magazine. Neither Lamberti publication names Tomapaint as its cutin supplier, so it could not be verified from Lamberti's side that the product uses Tomapaint's cutin or in what volume.

The second strand is EU research money. Since December 2022 Tomapaint has been one of 35 partners in AgriLoop, a €7.83 million Horizon Europe project coordinated by France's INRAE that runs to 30 November 2026 and works on turning agricultural residues into bio-based products. CORDIS shows an EU contribution of €276,116 for Tomapaint. The project website says the company tests and optimises cutin processes at pilot scale. In June 2026 AgriLoop researchers at ITQB NOVA in Lisbon reported antibacterial properties of tomato cutin fractions, according to Tomato News; that release does not mention Tomapaint.

The Money

The Commission listed Tomapaint for blended finance, a grant plus equity from the EIC Fund. No equity investment can be found. Tomapaint does not appear among the 319 organisations on the 16 pages of the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, CORDIS records only the grant, and the CRIBIS summary on informazione-aziende.it reports share capital unchanged between 2022 and 2024. No private funding round has been announced, and the company's own April 2025 interview with bioCIRCULAR LOOP credits only "early funding from the EU's Horizon program and Italian accelerators".

The filed accounts themselves are not freely available, so exact revenue, profit, equity and staff numbers could not be verified. What the public range shows is enough to compare with the plan: a revenue target of €19.25 million against 2024 revenue below €300,000.

Why Europe Should Care

Tomapaint sits where three EU priorities meet. The EIC funded it under the Green Deal, and the project summary on CORDIS frames it as circular-economy innovation that turns food industry waste into a material. It also targets food safety: on 19 December 2024 the Commission adopted a ban on bisphenol A in food contact materials, including can coatings, according to the Food Packaging Forum. Regulation (EU) 2024/3190 applies from 20 January 2025, but single-use packaging with BPA-based varnishes and coatings for preserved fruit, vegetables and processed fish may be marketed until 20 July 2028, according to the Commission's Access2Markets portal. Tomato cans fall in that category, so the regulatory push Tomapaint was built for arrives in full only in 2028.

The ban creates demand for BPA-free can coatings, but it does not oblige can makers to choose a bio-based one, and the established suppliers have alternatives of their own. Whether a resin made in one Lombard plant can compete on price and volume with those has not been shown in public.

The Verdict

Tomapaint has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.