Creating smart and attractive tools to enhance healthy and sustainable food provision, eating and treating of food at home

Urban lifestyles have led to more consumption of ultra-processed and packaged food[[ FAO. “Urban Food Action (UFA)”, 2019]]. Cooking skills may enhance healthy and sustainable diets, so supporting consumers provides potential[[ Hartmann, C., Dohle, S., Siegrist, M. Importance of cooking skills for balanced food choices, Appetite 65 (65), 125-131, 2013]]. There are also indications, that social change might be enhanced by encouraging minorities to publicly challenge unsustainable norms during social interactions[[ Bolderdijk, W.M. Jans,L. Minority influence in climate change mitigation, Current Opinion in Psychology 41, 25-30, 2021 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.02.005]]. This potential can be exploited to drive change in behaviour by citizen engagement.

Proposals are expected to address the following:

• Develop tools and applications that enhance citizens to have a healthy and sustainable food provision, diet and treating of food at home/ or discourage unhealthy and unsustainable choices that can be considered by national policy makers and private actors;
• Include in approaches ‘culinary culture dimension’ such as based on nationality, religion, culture, regionality and seasonality etc., and time and financial constraints;
• Engage citizens in solutions to create inclusive and sustainable solutions for broad uptake;
• Ensure that national nutritional policies and advice are respected as well as food safety;
• Link solutions to the issue of food waste and to the need to reduce household wastes generally, notably plastics, as part of a circular economy to include all aspects of sustainability tools that can be considered by national policy makers for implementation;
• Take a holistic approach, e.g. delivery (including prepared meals, micro deliveries, decentralised pick-up points) including transport and distribution aspects, short supply chains, marketing, sustainable packaging, recycling and reduction in food waste;
• Develop a sample plan to make available to Member State and Associated Countries authorities for several countries on how to enhance uptake of beneficial tools and applications considering different socio-economic characteristics of citizens and national laws.

Proposals must implement the 'multi-actor approach' and ensure adequate involvement of among others health actors, such as nutritionists, doctors and nurses.

Proposals should include a dedicated task, appropriate resources and a plan on how they will collaborate with other projects funded under this topic and under the topic HORIZON-CL6-2021-FARM2FORK-01-15: “Transition to healthy and sustainable dietary behavior”.

Proposal should apply social innovation and citizen engagement for inclusive and long-term solutions beyond the life cycle of the project and include a strong involvement of citizens/civil society, together with academia/research, industry/SMEs/start-ups and government/public authorities.

This topic should involve the effective contribution of SSH disciplines.