Project description
A paradigm shift towards a more efficient and sustainable food system
Food waste remains a significant global challenge, with marketing standards playing a dubious role in exacerbating the issue. Despite widespread acknowledgment, concrete evidence regarding the extent and causes of this problem remains scarce. The lack of understanding hampers efforts to effectively address and mitigate food waste, particularly concerning suboptimal foods. With this in mind, the EU-funded ROSETTA project aims to quantify food waste along the entire value chain. Through transdisciplinary research and engagement with stakeholders, it seeks to craft sustainable solutions for underused foods. By analysing current marketing standards frameworks and deploying pilot experiments across EU countries, ROSETTA anticipates slashing food waste by up to 80 %.
Objective
It appears that a substantial amount of food waste may be due to marketing standards, yet there is very limited concrete evidence on how much, why and how to address it. There is a need to deepen our understanding and identify solutions to prevent and reduce food waste along with any trade-offs, by improving the business potential of suboptimal foods. ROSETTA sets out to deliver reliable evidence, produced through transdisciplinary research with the engagement of use case multi-actors, that a) estimates food waste generated by the use of marketing standards along the whole value chain, b) co-defines and validates sustainable solutions for the valorisation of that waste, and c) assesses trade-offs. The current framework of marketing standards of food commodities at international, EU, national and private level, will be analysed, and the reasons for their establishment will be assessed. An operational plan will be developed to deploy pilot experiments in five (5) use cases across EU countries, led by private marketing standards owners or networks/clusters in the value chain, representing four (4) main food commodities, namely fruit & vegetables, cereals, dairy and meat. A comparative analysis of data collected from both lab and field research, combined with LCSA study, will validate and optimise use-case selected solutions, which are expected to reduce food waste due to marketing standards by 60% – 80% through alternative market access for suboptimal foods, including processing and other strategies as well as changes in social practices. The validated and optimised solutions will provide insights for knowledge transfer and identify opportunities for social learning. Insights will be used to develop replication guidelines and policy recommendations, addressed to food businesses, marketing standards owners, policy makers and regulators, to help revise or design marketing standards and support future policy development, in order to prevent and reduce food waste.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- agricultural sciencesanimal and dairy sciencedairy
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturehorticulturefruit growing
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturehorticulturevegetable growing
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturegrains and oilseedscereals
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
551 33 Kalamaria, Thessaloniki
Greece
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.