Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TITAN (Transparency solutions for transforming the food system.)
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-02-29
The European Green Deal is the central strategy of the European Union to transform European society with a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy, while addressing climate and environmental challenges. The Farm to Fork strategy follows the path traced by the European Green Deal, while responding to increased public awareness and the growing demand for a Food System capable of providing healthy, sustainable and affordable food. All players in the Food Value Chain are called upon to contribute to this goal thanks to recent technologies and recent discoveries in the sector. Farm to Fork aims at setting a global standard that can overturn the current paradigm consisting in air, water and soil pollution, loss of biodiversity and climate change and excessive consumption of natural resources.
For such an agri-food system to flourish, consumers must have better access to healthy, sustainable and affordable food, with transparent information about the integrity and true value of a food, so that they can make the better food choices that are necessary to increase demand. Enhancing transparency is an essential element in achieving this goal.
TITAN intends to leverage transparency and digital innovations in the food sector to pursue this paradigm shift: transforming the food system into a demand-driven economy that provides consumers with healthy and sustainable food. To achieve this goal, TITAN provides a broad platform for the development of pre-identified technologies and pilots that have been selected during the project through an open call for proposals. The 23 pilots (15 internals and 8 externals) aims to enhance transparency by deploying innovative technologies in different food supply chains by using Artificial Intelligence, Rapid Detection Methods, Blockchain.
To support this technological effort, key is the involvement of primary and secondary stakeholders in this process. Stakeholders are involved to analyze the actual food supply chains, identifying interactions between primary and secondary actors and the need of transparency among the ones so detected and how technology can fill the gap between them.
Finally, TITAN analyzes the current state of the art of policies related to transparency in order to establish a set of recommendations that are based on relevant stakeholders' perspectives to make the food supply chain more transparent and sustainable.
For such an agri-food system to flourish, consumers must have better access to healthy, sustainable and affordable food, with transparent information about the integrity and true value of a food, so that they can make the better food choices that are necessary to increase demand. Enhancing transparency is an essential element in achieving this goal.
TITAN intends to leverage transparency and digital innovations in the food sector to pursue this paradigm shift: transforming the food system into a demand-driven economy that provides consumers with healthy and sustainable food. To achieve this goal, TITAN provides a broad platform for the development of pre-identified technologies and pilots that have been selected during the project through an open call for proposals. The 23 pilots (15 internals and 8 externals) aims to enhance transparency by deploying innovative technologies in different food supply chains by using Artificial Intelligence, Rapid Detection Methods, Blockchain.
To support this technological effort, key is the involvement of primary and secondary stakeholders in this process. Stakeholders are involved to analyze the actual food supply chains, identifying interactions between primary and secondary actors and the need of transparency among the ones so detected and how technology can fill the gap between them.
Finally, TITAN analyzes the current state of the art of policies related to transparency in order to establish a set of recommendations that are based on relevant stakeholders' perspectives to make the food supply chain more transparent and sustainable.
The Consortium has already achieved important milestones.
Based on the inputs of the Project Coordinator, ILSI Europe, the Consortium equipped itself with internal procedures to ensure the proper management of the Continuous and Periodic Reporting activities, to prepare the partners to the official deadlines while ensuring excellence in the results of these activities. The Consortium is aware of ethical implications on different level, through the involvement of an appointed External Independent Ethics Advisor, that guides the Consortium in ensuring the compliance of all the activities on the following domains: trustworthy use of Artificial Intelligence, proper and compliant data management, human involvement and non-European countries relations. On Data Management, the joint efforts of INRAe and TUD led to the release of a Data Management Plan to prepare guidelines for the proper data management within the project and to the establishment of a Data Register and Data Repository on Zenodo.
Wageningen University has proceeded to a preliminary identification of primary and secondary stakeholders, along with their relationships and transparency roles. This identification has been done through the netchain concept and on the interdependencies between organization within particulr industries and/or groups.
The role of the stakeholders and their relations with technology has been analyzed by Technische Universiteit Delft through different activities. 6 out of the 15 pilots were invited to a BPMN Focus Group for modeling business processes of different companies. Individual online interviews were performed with various stakeholders such as: trade associations, companies, experts and organizations to obtains further insights into the requirements and challenges for digital transparency in food supply chains. A preliminary and detailed list of existing digital technologies and methodologies has been prepared including the definitions for these technologies and methodologies as well as how they create transparency in food supply chains along with a set for relevant semantic resources.
Using interviews and focus groups, Cardiff University has processed the analysis of transparency and its divergent understanding among the stakeholders interviewed. The Review of European Commission policies on sustainability, health and food safety - 56 documents relating to transparency - has provided the following result: despite being a common reference point in policy and regulation, transparency is either poorly defined or not defined at all and it is mostly related, in academic literature to end consumers. The Policy Review that has been conducted has also identified 5 themes that point towards an ethos of transparency: opennes, explication of rules, involvement of stakeholders, standardization of data/consistency of approach and independent and/or public scrutiny.
EFFoST as Communication Leader of the Project has established the Communication and Dissemination Strategy Plan also by developing the communication tools and materials and launching the communication channels on both LinkedIn and Twitter/X. The Project website is a user-friendly platform where the most relevant results of the project can be found. A Newsletter is issued on a three-month basis to present the main insights coming from the project implementation.
The project aims at involving Stakeholders to support the transformation of the Food System. So far, three Stakeholder Board Workshop were held online to meet the Stakeholders using an interactive approach. Besides the Workshops, EFFoST has been organizing two Webinars dedicated to promote the project partners and their expertise. TITAN aims at establishing Education programmes to provide educational material related to the project, focusing on transparency and traceability in the food system; different softwares were analyzed to ensure the best fit for these materials on the project website.
Transforming the food system by deploying relevant technologies in different food domains is one of the objectives of the project. The 15 pre-identified pilots have identified their KPIs and they are progressing according to their timeline in the domains of food safety, sustainability and health, led respectively by Agroknow, INRAe and QUB.
The development of these pre-identified pilots has been conducted also under the guidance of Foodscale Hub and the activities of the Business Support Programme and Exploitation and Business Modeling with dedicated plenary and one2one meetings with actors of the project. The innovative range of TITAN has widen in 2024 through the awarding of 8 additional pilots that have been selected through the TITAN Open Call with an allocated budget, overall, of 1.25 M€.
Based on the inputs of the Project Coordinator, ILSI Europe, the Consortium equipped itself with internal procedures to ensure the proper management of the Continuous and Periodic Reporting activities, to prepare the partners to the official deadlines while ensuring excellence in the results of these activities. The Consortium is aware of ethical implications on different level, through the involvement of an appointed External Independent Ethics Advisor, that guides the Consortium in ensuring the compliance of all the activities on the following domains: trustworthy use of Artificial Intelligence, proper and compliant data management, human involvement and non-European countries relations. On Data Management, the joint efforts of INRAe and TUD led to the release of a Data Management Plan to prepare guidelines for the proper data management within the project and to the establishment of a Data Register and Data Repository on Zenodo.
Wageningen University has proceeded to a preliminary identification of primary and secondary stakeholders, along with their relationships and transparency roles. This identification has been done through the netchain concept and on the interdependencies between organization within particulr industries and/or groups.
The role of the stakeholders and their relations with technology has been analyzed by Technische Universiteit Delft through different activities. 6 out of the 15 pilots were invited to a BPMN Focus Group for modeling business processes of different companies. Individual online interviews were performed with various stakeholders such as: trade associations, companies, experts and organizations to obtains further insights into the requirements and challenges for digital transparency in food supply chains. A preliminary and detailed list of existing digital technologies and methodologies has been prepared including the definitions for these technologies and methodologies as well as how they create transparency in food supply chains along with a set for relevant semantic resources.
Using interviews and focus groups, Cardiff University has processed the analysis of transparency and its divergent understanding among the stakeholders interviewed. The Review of European Commission policies on sustainability, health and food safety - 56 documents relating to transparency - has provided the following result: despite being a common reference point in policy and regulation, transparency is either poorly defined or not defined at all and it is mostly related, in academic literature to end consumers. The Policy Review that has been conducted has also identified 5 themes that point towards an ethos of transparency: opennes, explication of rules, involvement of stakeholders, standardization of data/consistency of approach and independent and/or public scrutiny.
EFFoST as Communication Leader of the Project has established the Communication and Dissemination Strategy Plan also by developing the communication tools and materials and launching the communication channels on both LinkedIn and Twitter/X. The Project website is a user-friendly platform where the most relevant results of the project can be found. A Newsletter is issued on a three-month basis to present the main insights coming from the project implementation.
The project aims at involving Stakeholders to support the transformation of the Food System. So far, three Stakeholder Board Workshop were held online to meet the Stakeholders using an interactive approach. Besides the Workshops, EFFoST has been organizing two Webinars dedicated to promote the project partners and their expertise. TITAN aims at establishing Education programmes to provide educational material related to the project, focusing on transparency and traceability in the food system; different softwares were analyzed to ensure the best fit for these materials on the project website.
Transforming the food system by deploying relevant technologies in different food domains is one of the objectives of the project. The 15 pre-identified pilots have identified their KPIs and they are progressing according to their timeline in the domains of food safety, sustainability and health, led respectively by Agroknow, INRAe and QUB.
The development of these pre-identified pilots has been conducted also under the guidance of Foodscale Hub and the activities of the Business Support Programme and Exploitation and Business Modeling with dedicated plenary and one2one meetings with actors of the project. The innovative range of TITAN has widen in 2024 through the awarding of 8 additional pilots that have been selected through the TITAN Open Call with an allocated budget, overall, of 1.25 M€.