The cold chain permits to process and commercialise in good conditions of quality and safety a wide range of foods. However the cold chain represents high energy consumption. OPTICOLD objective is to increase sustainability of the cold chain by optimising the compromise between energy consumption, safety, quality and shelf life for refrigerated processed foods. Cold chain is currently managed to respect target temperatures, determined by regulation and specifications agreed among stake-holders. OPTICOLD project proposes a new approach, aiming at a multi-criteria management of the cold chain, with a main role for minimisation of energy consumption. To meet this objective, OPTICOLD project will build a global model of the cold chain, by linking energy consumption with variables that determine food shelf life: its microbiological safety and its quality. This type of model does not exist at the moment for the whole cold chain. It will be established using the relations linking all these variables, energy consumption, safety and quality, to the temperatures of the cold chain. In particular cold in the food processing plant, for which scientific knowledge is lacking, but for which empirical professional knowledge indicates a high potential to save energy, will be studied in priority. A management of cold chain based in priority on energy consumption will permit to reduce energy consumption, but it may results in cold temperatures distribution more prone to deteriorate quality and safety (the variables determining shelf life). It is therefore necessary to develop multicriteria approaches to determine the margins of action on temperature distributions, or “acceptable variations for cold temperatures”, considering the requirements for quality and safety. This implies the most accurate prediction of safety and quality as a function of cold temperatures. A the moment, relations between food safety or quality and cold temperatures are described with important uncertainties, which imply important margins of safety on the temperature regimes of the cold chain, and therefore over-spending of energy. OPTICOLD will therefore integrate to the studies on energy consumption, researches on the physiology of cold adaptation in bacteria and researches in bio-physic on plant tissues destructuration, as the cause of non-microbiological spoilage of raw plant foods. In an optimised cold chain, the relation built in the project between energy cost and the shelf-life variables will permit to quantify the gain in energy consumption reduction with the consecutive loss in shelf-life, for all the steps of the chain. Then the steps for which the most important gain in energy consumption can be obtained for the least loss in shelf life will be identified. The approach of the OPTICOLD project will be developed on processed, refrigerated foods. Three food categories will be studies, to cover very different conditions to impart a generic dimension to the project: living food with a physiological activity which spoilage is mostly not microbiological (fresh cut salads), dead and raw food (fresh pastry dough), pasteurized chilled food (fresh pasteurized pasta). The possibilities to generalize the OPTICOLD approach developed on these three food categories to other types of foods will be studied.