The scope of the IFUNFoods project is to produce innovative foods with immobilized lactic acid bacteria cultures on natural prebiotic supports (nuts, fruits, cereals, etc.) and to study their potential beneficial properties in humans. It is therefore an ambitious 3-year research project that focuses on scaling up innovative technological processes for the production of functional food ingredients, evaluating their effectiveness in experimental animal models, and confirming their health effects by clinical trials. Our approach aims at the isolation of new "wild" type lactic acid bacteria strains from biological samples, such as traditionally fermented foods, their evaluation and characterization, and subsequently at the development of symbiotic food ingredients that enhance probiotic cell viability and promote human health.