By the end of the 8 year programme, the expected benefits of AKER will involve all stakeholders in the sector:

• Increasing the productivity of white sugar to be competitive with sugar cane by 2020,
• Increasing the genetic variability for use in breeding,
• Increasing responsiveness to future market challenges,
• Increasing the efficiency of sugar beet breeding by integrating bioinformatics and genomic tools,
• Optimizing breeding methodologies and approaches for sugar beet and other hybrids,
• Developing new phenotypic tests that can be used at high throughput,
• A better understanding of the best parameters to phenotype for yield improvement,
• The training of human resources adapted to new advances in bioinformatics and the integration of genomic tools,
• The introduction of innovative equipment for phenotyping and genotyping at high throughput.