Consumers’ Understanding of Eating Sustainably

Project Information

CUES

Grant agreement ID: 101136507

DOI

10.3030/101136507

EC signature date 6 December 2023

Start date 1 March 2024

End date 29 February 2028

Funded under

• Food, Bioeconomy Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment

Total cost

€ 6 496 857,50

EU contribution

€ 6 496 856,75

Coordinated by

ERASMUS UNIVERSITEIT ROTTERDAM
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CUES (Consumers’ Understanding of Eating Sustainably)

Reporting period: 2024-03-01 to 2025-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

CUES addresses the urgent need for systemic transformation of Europe’s food system in line with the Green Deal. The project is built on the Triple Change framework (change in culture, food value chain, policy), recognising that healthy and sustainable food should become more accessible, affordable, and trustworthy for consumers, while also being fairly supported by the value chain and governance structures.
The overall objectives are: 1) To co-design scientific methods and approaches to transmit and present sustainability-related information and identify persuasive cues that guide sustainable behaviour. 2) To equip actors in the food value chain with strategies and innovations to enhance transparency and trust. 3) To engage consumers through community-led interventions and behaviour-change toolkits. 4) To inform policy through structured dialogues and evidence-based recommendations.
Expected impacts include stronger consumer empowerment, improved trust in sustainability communication, and better-informed governance of sustainable food systems.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In the first 18 months, CUES focused on:
Scientific foundations: Insights were gathered from academic sources and data collected in multiple EU countries (including both general consumers and vulnerable groups). These insights helped identify key drivers and barriers of (un)sustainable food choices. They include personal norms, social norms, cultural traditions, attitudes towards sustainable food categories, food literacy knowledge. The insights shed light on how sustainable consumer behaviours can be promoted effectively.
Food value chain: CUES co-identified several cross-country systemic challenges of transparency, traceability, and trust in business models with various value chain actors in Italy, Greece, Hungary, and Iceland. These identified barriers include market risks, weak incentives, regulatory complexity, capacity limitations in SMEs, data reliability issues, and low collaboration among food value chain actors. Also, misaligned interests, compliance burdens, and limited consumer recognition are found to hinder the adoption of transparency.
Consumers and culture: Working with schools, low-income families, elderly groups, and through digital applications, CUES managed to tailor intervention designs for different target groups. Engaging with the vision of various stakeholders, we identified context-specific actions that are needed, including strengthening food literacy, leveraging intermediares such as teachers and social workers, and developing accessible and trusted information tools; targeting cognition, attitudes, perceptions, and behavior, attitude-behavior gap, trust in information sources, influence of social environments on food choices.
Policy and governance: Reviewing more than 1,500 EU policy and legal acts (2015–2025), we identified 101 relevant measures on sustainable food consumption. We found that sustainable food consumption is framed primarily in environmental terms, while there is limited ambition to introduce binding measures aimed at changing consumption patterns or improving food environments. Consumers are largely perceived as passive recipients of information rather than active agents of change. Some regional and national policies are more ambitions than EU ones.
Impact assessment: As a baseline, we surveyed over 300 agri-food companies across Europe on conditions for adopting digital technology for transparency, transparency performance, collaboration and value chain structure, sustainability attributes communicated to consumers, and existing transparency and traceability technologies, with initial findings showing that organizational antecedents influence transparency performance through collaboration and value chain structure.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

CUES’ review of academic sources helped identify key gaps in existing research. The insights of our data further address these gaps and provide new evidence that goes beyond the current state of the art. The findings on consumer behaviour are across all three dimensions of food sustainability, whereas much of the existing research tends to focus on a single dimension only, most often the environmental one. We identified perceived trade-offs between the three dimensions (e.g. purchasing organic products that are imported), highlighting tensions in consumer decision-making that remain underexplored in the field. Our findings also capture rare insights into low- income and aging populations, revealing the important role of structural vulnerabilities, digital exclusion and emotional food motivations in their (un)sustainable food behaviours. By combining social sciences and humanities, and participatory co-design approach with various stakeholders, CUES is producing comprehensive research output on consumer drivers of sustainable eating in Europe. The findings not only show how consumers perceive sustainability cues but also how stakeholder dynamics influence trust in the food system. CUES is simultaneously designing nine co-created interventions that target consumers and value-chain actors. This systemic approach allows for scalable impact, ensuring that interventions are not limited to individual behaviour but extend across the food environment and governance structures. CUES also advances European synergies through clustering with other projects, thereby supporting comparability between initiatives and strengthening the scientific and practical foundations for transforming food environments, enabling trust-based consumer empowerment at scale.