2022-06-23
Public engagement to enable a sustainable food packaging culture in Europe
InformPack explores the cross-cultural variations that exist amongst consumers in terms of awareness, information gaps, issues and attitudes towards food packaging as related to product choice upon purchase and disposal patterns at home and on the go. Findings will be used to create actions, tools, and strategies that will influence public behaviour and bring forward solutions to enable transition to a more sustainable European food-packaging ecosystem.
InformPack’s aim is to achieve a change in public’s behaviour that will enable a transition to a more sustainable European food-packaging ecosystem. This will be achieved by building targeted tools, strategies, and engagement activities that address the public’s knowledge gaps, questions, and expectations, while leveraging expert knowledge and taking into account the issues and needs of the food-packaging sector. However, as identified in the PoC, public engagement alone cannot resolve all issues because the public's behaviour is closely linked to available systemic and packaging solutions.
Therefore, to support this behavioural shift and make the sustainable choice easier for the public, in 2022 InformPack will set up and co-create solutions to industrial challenges, using the target group as a source of inspiration to generate alternative packaging concepts (“fresh produce packaging” and ““hard plastic packages: focus on bottles”) that also incorporate the packaging value chain stakeholders’ needs and reality.
Objectives
• Increase number of citizens taking part in co-creation activities
• Increase collaboration amongst packaging value chain stakeholders across Europe to find common resolutions, with better success rates (acceptance), to contemporary systemic challenges.
• Increase engagement of citizens in the food system (agents of change) in targeted countries (ES and PL) across Europe.
HELPFOOD
Food Ecosystem Scalability
HelpFood 4.0 aims to test and demonstrate the importance of designing and supporting social infrastructures to make food circular sustainability more practicable by scaling up and replicating the socio-digital innovation experimented into other RIS countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal). The project explores the role of food as an element of reconnection between farmers, citizens and “eaters” (i.e. citizens more aware of sustainable food issues) through the promotion of Community-Supported Agriculture models as sustainable examples of production, distribution, and consumption of food.
The shortening of the supply chain could be a solution to improve the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the food supply chain. To promote these changes, it is necessary to work with a multiscale and multilevel approach. The project promotes the sustainability of high-quality food along the food value chain due to cooperation between research organizations and farmers and the promotion of short supply chains. The empowerment of eaters will be pursued by providing information on geographical traceability and nutritional information, with the development of an IT tool allowing eaters to directly visualize the origin of ingredients to be implemented in food labelling.
The project starts from the empirical research developed during the pilot project HelpFood in 2021 and foreseen the scaling up and replication of the socio-technical innovation experimented in other RIS countries.
Objectives
• Enhance the competitiveness of the local ecosystems by identifying new production and market opportunities, with increased returns for the companies as already demonstrated by the EU Geographical Indications’ system.
• Support innovative value chain design that will improve the competitiveness of small-scale farmers and local distributors.
• Optimize the local Agrifood supply chain with new digital functionalities and services
• Increase citizens' awareness and understanding of the benefits provided by alternative food systems.
• Improve the economical sustainability of local farmers and export the CSA model in other RIS countries.
• Measure and monitor well-being and progress using both quantitative and qualitative research methods and techniques.
• Engage local policymakers to make the distribution model more systemic.
