Food and environmental transitions are worldwide major challenges as illustrated by the EU Green Deal and the Farm to Fork Strategy for a fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly food system. Contributing to the worldwide food transition requires the production of more sustainable foods that must also meet the consumers’ expectations. Taking up this major challenge requires expertise in domains as diverse as health, sociology, economy, ecology, agronomy, and therefore a multi-sectoral and multi-disciplinary approach mobilizing applied and basic sciences. Food can be considered as one of the most sophisticated examples of soft condensed matter. Its complexity arises from the intricacy of several components, the various aggregation states in which foods are encountered and the multitude of relevant characteristic time and length scales. The use of fundamental soft matter approaches to rationalize foods is still in its infancy. However, it is key for reaching a significant advancement towards a sustainable food system. Indeed, soft matter approaches allow a rational control and understanding of the various steps of the processes leading to food production, ranging from the extraction and functionality structure of the main ingredients and their mutual interactions, to their multi-scale structuration. The MSCA Doctorates “Edible Soft Matter” (ESM) will train a new generation of creative, entrepreneurial and innovative early-stage researchers (ESRs), able to face the current challenges for a sustainable food system. They will be able to convert knowledge and ideas into products and services for economic and social benefit by becoming researchers, regulators, consultants, project managers/leaders, with an expertise in designing, producing and assessing innovative and sustainable food products. They will benefit from a training in (1) soft matter and food research, through their Individual Research Projects, including an exposure to the non-academic sector through at least one industrial secondment, and (2) the essential knowledge in human science, global energetic cost, life cycle analysis and waste management, by participating to the ESM network-wide training activities (summer schools, workshops etc.), which will also provide them with key transferable skills such as project management, entrepreneurship, publication and proposal writing, and open science. The ESM ESRs will develop high and complementary skills in food & soft matter sciences and overcome technological, economic, industrial and sustainability issues, thus contributing to the development of the food of the future. Particularly timely, the ESM project will demonstrate how a fundamental soft matter approach is crucial to provide rational perspectives and understanding on several food-related societal challenges such as healthy eating, alternative formulations for food and texture control of novel food. The ESM consortium currently includes eight beneficiaries from seven EU or H2020 associated countries and three partner organisations located in Canada and UK. Eleven internationally renowned academic groups from the eight beneficiaries are involved in the project with well-balanced and complementary expertise in food science and soft matter. This complementarity will allow cross-fertilization between scientific communities, notably through exchange of know-how, which will be a warranty of success of the project. The consortium will also gather several agro food industries that will bring their expertise and knowledge on the extraction and basic functional properties of food ingredients, the industrial processes at play and their view on the future in terms of fulfilling consumers’ expectations. The ANR-MRSEI grant will be decisive to finalize the ESM consortium, notably by including non-academic organisations, and to organize two consortium meetings. Both actions are required to draft a well-structured and convincing MSCA Doctorates project proposal.