Project summary
Understanding the impacts of food marketing standards is quite complex as, they cover various sectors, are regulated at different levels, and have potential side-effects. Their interaction with Food Waste (FW) remains unclear, with the existing evidence being limited and contradictory. Furthermore, as marketing standards are introduced to meet wider objectives, trade-offs between such objectives and FW prevention, need to be assessed. This assessment should guide a re-balancing of marketing standards, to effectively meet contradicting goals. At the same time, FW, once accounted as a liability, is increasingly considered a potential source of business value, with suboptimal – but still safe to eat – foods, being a case still unexplored. What is needed therefore, is a dual approach, that first prevents FW generation by ‘re-balancing’ food marketing standards, and then improves market access to suboptimal foods to prevent them from becoming FW.
Drawing from all above, BREADCRUMB:
- will create an inventory of private and interrelated public food marketing standards, and will provide an understanding of their purpose and nature
- will create an empirical evidence base to generate estimates of FW related to marketing standards in five food commodities (fruit & vegetables, meat, eggs, cereals, fish)
- will model the underlying mechanisms through which, marketing standards lead to FW generation, and the trade-offs between the objective of preventing FW reduction and other objectives pursued by marketing standards, and will use the results to propose a re-balancing of existing standards
- will improve market access to suboptimal foods by guiding food businesses to select appropriate marketing channels and to quantify their business value, and by fostering change in consumers’ acceptance of suboptimal foods
- will structure the previous results into operational and policy guidance on how to prevent/reduce FW related to marketing standards.
Objectives
- 1. To establish a holistic view of the existing food marketing standards in the EU and their interrelations, by placing special emphasis on the least documented ones, i.e.: (i) private standards, and (ii) standards adopted at the level of specific Member States. Moreover, to identify the marketing standards which are most relevant to FW generation.
- 2. To create an empirical evidence base, by fusing existing and project-generated data, to provide estimates of the FW generated due to marketing standards in the supply chains of five targeted food commodities (fruits & vegetables, meat, eggs, cereals, fish)
- 3. To understand and model: (i) the underlying mechanisms through which, marketing standards lead to FW generation, and (ii) the trade-offs between the objective of FW reduction and other objectives pursued by marketing standards. To structure and validate solutions (re-balancing) that alleviate the negative impacts of marketing standards to FW, while balancing the trade-offs with their other objectives.
- 4. To improve market access and business potential of foods that do not meet marketing standards but are still safe to eat (suboptimal foods), by: (i) guiding food businesses in selecting appropriate marketing channels and business models, and assisting them in quantifying their business value; (ii) fostering change in consumers’ and businesses’ attitudes towards sub-optimal foods, through nudging marketing cues.
- 5. To effectively manage the upscaling of the project results by: (i) developing operational guidelines and policy recommendations on how to prevent/reduce FW due to marketing standards, and thereby contributing to environmental sustainability and circularity of the food system; (ii) formulating a Code of Conduct balancing commercial and social value from suboptimal foods, and thereby contributing to economic sustainability and food poverty reduction; (iii) developing a strategy for the exploitation of key project results by the project partners (individually and jointly); (iv) undertaking appropriate dissemination and communication actions to maximise the project’s impact; (v) establishing formal agreements (MoUs) with relevant projects to achieve impact synergies.
Context
Food marketing standards are obligatory rules or optional reserved terms aiming to address ‘the expectations of consumers and to improve the economic conditions for the production and marketing as well as the quality of agricultural products’.
Marketing standards ‘set minimum quality requirements for products that are traded and sold to consumers and specify their characteristics using specific terms’.
Ongoing EU policy initiatives aim at addressing the need for marketing standards to take into account sustainability considerations, changing consumer preferences, or evolving technologies, and to ensure that all foods placed in the EU market are becoming increasingly sustainable.
However, understanding the impacts of marketing standards is quite complex as, they cover various product sectors,are regulated at different levels, and have potential side-effects.
Expected Impacts
BREADCRUMB aims to provide an empirical evidence-based understanding of the purpose and nature of food marketing standards and their impact on FW generation, to propose interventions that balance the objectives of reducing FW and other objectives of standards, and to help food chain actors increase the business potential of suboptimal foods. To achieve its aim, the project will pursue five detailed objectives
