Ensuring sustainable food systems requires vastly reducing its environmental and health costs while making healthy and sustainable food affordable to all. In current food systems many of the costs of harmful foods and benefits of healthful foods are externalized, i.e. are not reflected in market prices and therefore not in decision making of actors in food value chains. Solving the externality problems means to determine current costs of externalities and redefine food prices (true pricing) to internalize them in daily practice. Policy makers, businesses and other actors in the food system, lack sufficient information and knowledge to internalize externalities to achieve a sustainable food system. FOODCoST responds to this challenge by designing a roadmap for effective and sustainable strategies to assess and internalise food externalities. FOODCoST provides approaches and databases to measure and value positive and negative externalities, proposing a game-changing and harmonised approach to calculate the value of climate, biodiversity, environmental, social and health externalities along the food value chain based on economic cost principles. FOODCoST provides an analytical toolbox to experiment, analyse, and navigate the internalisation of externalities through policies and business strategies providing tools and guidance to policy makers and businesses to assess the sustainability impact of their internalisation actions. FOODCoST emphasises the diversity of challenges of true pricing in different value chains and countries and regions, and cocreates, tests and validates the valuation and internalisation approaches in 11 diverse case studies enabling to test, validate and enrich the approaches in order to transit towards a sustainable food system. The project will be based on a multi-actor approach that will ensure a continuous dialogue with all relevant actors across the whole food system (land and sea).

GLOPACK proposes a cutting-edge strategy addressing the technical and societal barriers to spread in our social system, innovative eco-efficient packaging able to reduce food environmental footprint. Focusing on accelerating the transition to a circular economy concept, GLOPACK aims to support users and consumers’ access to innovative packaging solutions enabling the reduction and circular management of agro-food, including packaging, wastes. Building from existing key enabling but simply applicable technologies, GLOPACK will focus on increasing the TRL of the three main promising advances in the food packaging area: (1) bio-circular (biodegradable materials issued from agro-food residues conversion) packaging materials, (2) active packaging to improve food preservation and shelf-life without additives and (3) RFID enabled wireless food spoilage indicator as new generation of self-adjusting food date label. GLOPACK strategy will tackle the diffusion of these innovation through the whole stakeholders chains, from the researcher up to the consumer, i.e. the uptake by packaging industry through pilot and large-scale processing for the selected technologies, by food companies through the deployment of a software tool for decision making and for providing proof of usefulness to all stakeholders, by others users (e.g. retailers) and consumer through user-driven adoption strategies, cost-benefit analysis and validation and retro-active adjustment in close to real conditions. Validation of the solutions including compliance with legal requirements, economic feasibility and environmental impact will push forward the three technologies tested and the related decision-making tool from TRL 3-4 to 7 for a rapid and easy market uptake contributing therefore to strengthen European companies’ competitiveness in an always more globalised and connected world.

Strength2Food is a 5-year, €6.9 million project to improve the effectiveness of EU food quality schemes (FQS), public sector food procurement (PSFP) and to stimulate Short Food Supply Chains (SFSC) through research, innovation and demonstration activities. Our 30-partner consortium representing 11 EU and 4 non-EU countries combines leading academic, communication, SME and stakeholder organisations to ensure a multi-actor approach. It will undertake case study-based quantitative research to measure economic, environmental and social impacts of FQS, PSFP and SFSC. The impact of PSFP policies on balanced nutrition in schools will also be assessed. Primary research will be complemented by advanced econometric analysis of existing datasets to determine impacts of FQS and SFSC participation on farm performance and survival, as well as understand price transmission and trade patterns. Consumer knowledge, confidence in, valuation and use of FQS labels and products will be assessed via cross-national survey, ethnographic and virtual supermarket-based research. Lessons from the research will be applied and verified in 6 pilot initiatives, focusing on less-developed and transition regions. These initiatives bring together academic and non-academic stakeholder partners in action research. The six pilot actions are: a school meals initiative to improve the nutritional outcomes and economic benefits for local agri-food producers; in-store trials (undertaken with a grocery retailer) to upscale sales of local produce; a scheme to stimulate a sustainable SFSC that adds value to the fishing community; and pilot actions to expand regional food labelling; increase sales of FQS products in non-traditional markers; and improve returns to local producers at food fairs and farmers’ markets (via a smartphone app). Project impact will be maximised through a knowledge exchange platform, hybrid forums, school educational resources, a Massive Open Online Course and practitioner recommendations.

Ecological approaches to farming practices are gaining interest across Europe. As this interest grows there is a pressing need to assess the potential contributions these practices may make, the contexts in which they function and their attractiveness to farmers as potential adopters. In particular, ecological agriculture must be assessed against the aim of promoting the improved performance and sustainability of farms, rural environment, rural societies and economies, together. The overall goal of LIFT is to identify the potentiel benefits of the adoption of ecological farming in the European Union (EU) and to understand how socio-economic and policy factors impact the adoption, performance and sustainability of ecological farming at various scales, from the level of the single farm to that of a territory. To meet this goal, LIFT will assess the determinants of adoption of ecological approaches, and evaluate the performance and overall sustainability of these approaches in comparison to more conventional agriculture across a range of farm systems and geographic scales. LIFT will also develop new private arrangements and policy instruments that could improve the adoption and subsequent performance and sustainability of the rural nexus. For this, LIFT will suggest an innovative framework for multi-scale sustainability assessment aimed at identifying critical paths toward the adoption of ecological approaches to enhance public goods and ecosystem services delivery. This will be achieved through the integration of transdisciplinary scientific knowledge and stakeholder expertise to co-develop innovative decision-support tools. The project will inform and support EU priorities relating to agriculture and the environment in order to promote the performance and sustainability of the combined rural system. At least 30 case studies will be performed in order to reflect the enormous variety in the socio-economic and bio-physical conditions for agriculture across the EU.