The EIC Accelerator Backed Xnext's Food X-Ray Scanner: Did It Work

Metal detectors find metal, and the X-ray machines on most food lines find metal, stone and glass. A shard of hard plastic, a cherry stone, a splinter of wood or an insect usually goes through. Xnext, a Milan company founded in 2014 by Bruno Garavelli and Pietro Pozzi, built an X-ray detector meant to catch exactly those. In the 9 January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, it was selected for XSpectra, and the European Commission's list of winners names it as the project's only company, then registered as "Xnext srl". The EU contributed €2,276,722.88 to a project costing €3,279,961.25, which ran from 1 April 2019 to 30 September 2021, according to CORDIS.

Seven years after the award, the scanner is a product. The EIB counted 50 systems installed in Italy, France, Slovakia and Germany when it lent the company €20 million in 2023. The question this article tries to answer is the one the EU grant cannot: whether the business behind the machine works.

What Xnext Is Doing Now

Xnext is active. Its website sells three versions of XSpectra: a top-down machine for bakery, pasta, dairy and salads, an XL version for meat and chicken, and a lateral or diagonal one for jars, bottles and cans. It also lists pharmaceutical and recycling applications, though no customer in those fields is named. Its latest news items date from 2024, including a partnership with the Italian vegetable processing machine maker Turatti announced at Fruit Logistica in February 2024.

The most recent independent sign of activity is from November 2025, when Barilla named Xnext the winner of the "New Frontiers of Detection" category of its Good Food Makers programme, together with the weighing and inspection group Bizerba, according to efanews and Yumda. The winners were to run co-design work and trials with Barilla's teams ahead of an Innovation Day on 15 January 2026. No result of those trials, and no supply contract with Barilla, has been made public. The Italian company register data reported by reportaziende and aziende.it show the company as active, with no insolvency or liquidation procedure recorded.

The Technology: Counting Photons One by One

A conventional food X-ray machine measures how much radiation passes through a product, at one or two energy bands. Dense objects such as metal, stone and glass show up as dark spots; materials of similar density to the food around them do not. XSpectra uses a photon-counting detector, built on cadmium telluride according to the company's website, that sorts each incoming X-ray photon by its energy, at up to 1,024 levels against the two of conventional systems, according to the CORDIS results article and the trade magazine inVISION. Different materials absorb different energies differently, so the spectrum says something about what an object is made of, not just how dense it is. Deep learning software then classifies the result and, the company says, learns each product's normal variation to cut false rejects.

inVISION reports that the system works at X-ray energies down to 5 keV, against about 25 keV for conventional machines. Xnext says this lets it find plastics, wood, insects, kernels and non-calcified bone. Those detection claims come from the company and from articles based on its statements; no independent test of detection rates against competing machines has been published.

What sets Xnext apart, on its own account, is that it builds the detector, the electronics and the software itself; the CORDIS objective calls the three "all industrialized in-house", and the company's website describes Xnext as "the 1st company in the world to design a hyperspectral detector for food inspection", a claim that could not be verified independently.

What the EU Grant Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The XSpectra proposal said the detector had passed industrial prototype testing and was running in a field test on one production line. The grant was to take it to "the final industrial product" and the start of worldwide sales. The closing report on CORDIS set four aims: publicity for the technology, demonstration centres, "reference champions" who would validate it on their lines, and an aggressive sales plan.

The report claims success on each, and some of it can be checked elsewhere. It says the project ended with 10 installations on food lines, three demonstration centres, five reference customers instead of the planned three, the first installations outside Italy, in France, and a digital launch of the machine in September 2021. One reference customer is public: the biscuit maker Deco Industrie said in September 2021 that it uses XSpectra for quality control of its biscuits, according to Tech Princess. The other installations are not named.

During the project Xnext made a decision that changed what it sells. Instead of supplying a detector to machine builders, it decided to design and build the whole inspection machine itself. Staff rose from 16 at the start of the project to 42 at the end, and the company moved into a 2,000 square metre headquarters with space for production, testing and its demonstration centre, the report says.

1. Final industrial productDeliveredComplete machine launched in September 2021, per the CORDIS report; three versions on sale today.
2. Reference champions on real linesDeliveredFive reported against three planned; Deco Industrie confirmed publicly.
3. Demonstration centresCompany claimThree reported by the company; no independent account.
4. Start of international salesDeliveredFrance by 2021; Slovakia and Germany by 2023, per the EIB.
5. Pharma, recycling and other sectorsNot shownListed on the website; no customer named.

The project ended on schedule on 30 September 2021. Judged against what it promised, the grant did its job: a prototype in a field test became a machine on sale with paying users.

What Followed the Grant

Money followed. In May 2021, still during the project, Neva First, the venture capital fund of Neva SGR, part of the Intesa Sanpaolo group, invested €5 million in a capital increase, and Xnext became a joint-stock company (S.p.A.), according to Fortune Italia and the CORDIS report. Garavelli called it "a turning point". Earlier, in February 2016, the company had run an equity crowdfunding campaign on Equinvest with a €500,000 target, according to Osborne Clarke, which advised on it; the amount raised could not be verified from a primary source. The Milan industry association Assolombarda lists business angels and club deals among its other funding sources and says Xnext has opened offices in France and the United States.

In November 2023 the European Investment Bank announced a €20 million venture debt loan under the InvestEU programme, signed on 31 October 2023, for research, development and international expansion. The EIB project page puts the total cost of the programme it supports at €53 million. The bank expected the loan to help create about 70 skilled jobs in Italy, and said 50 XSpectra systems had been deployed.

Xnext does not appear in the EIC Fund's list of equity investment beneficiaries, which fits a 2019 grant-only award. CORDIS lists no other EU research project with the company as a participant.

The Money

Filed accounts, as reported by topaziende and cross-checked with reportaziende and aziende.it, show a company whose sales have grown from almost nothing but remain small next to its costs. Revenue was €32,000 in 2020, €1.56 million in 2021, €3.06 million in 2022, €1.12 million in 2023 and €2.63 million in 2024. The net loss was €6.08 million in 2021, €5.21 million in 2022, €6.54 million in 2023 and €11.51 million in 2024.

Value of production, which in Italian accounts also includes items such as capitalised development costs and grants, was €5.30 million in 2023 and €2.74 million in 2024, according to topaziende. aziende.it reports personnel costs of €2.24 million and 35 employees for 2024, while topaziende gives 40 employees; the two register-based sources disagree. Equity and debt figures are not shown by either free source, so the balance sheet effect of the EIB loan and the 2024 loss could not be verified.

Why Europe Should Care

Food safety is one of the EU's oldest shared policies. The Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed, set up in 1979 and based on the General Food Law of 2002, exists so that national authorities can act quickly when a contaminated product is found. Foreign bodies are a regular cause of recalls, and each recall wastes food that was otherwise fit to eat. The CORDIS report puts it in numbers taken from industry sources: a single recalled 125 gram jar of tomato wastes 223 litres of water and 1.5 kilograms of CO2, it says, a figure that could not be checked independently.

There is also a supply chain angle. Photon-counting X-ray detectors are a specialised technology, and Xnext designs its detector electronics in Europe. The EIB loan, backed by the EU budget through InvestEU, shows that the EU's own lending arm treated it as a technology worth keeping in Europe.

The Verdict

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