Food Marketing Standards (FMS) in the EU set the minimum quality requirements for agricultural products, aiming to meet consumer expectations and ensure market efficiency. However, these standards, while designed to guarantee product quality and support economic objectives, can unintentionally drive significant levels of food waste (FW). Foods that do not meet strict cosmetic or quality criteria; despite being perfectly safe and nutritious are often excluded from the market and discarded as waste (if not revalorized and injected back into the human consumption stream). This not only represents a loss of valuable resources but also undermines efforts toward sustainability, food security, and climate action. BREADCRUMB aims to analyze FMS and their impact on FW across five key commodities; fruits and vegetables, meat, eggs, cereals, and fish through 16 multi-actor case studies. The project develops evidence-based solutions to rebalance FMS, reduce FW, and enhance the business potential of suboptimal foods, while delivering climate and circularity benefits.
Through a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary approach, its main objectives are to:
1. To establish a holistic view of the existing FMS in the EU and their interrelations, by placing special emphasis on the least documented ones, i.e.: (i) private standards, and (ii) standards adopted at the level of specific Member States. Moreover, to identify the marketing standards which are most relevant to FW generation.
2. To create an empirical evidence base, by fusing existing and project-generated data, to provide estimates of the FW generated due to marketing standards in the supply chains of five targeted food commodities (fruits and vegetables, meat, eggs, cereals, fish).
3. To understand and model: (i) the underlying mechanisms through which, marketing standards lead to FW generation, and (ii) the trade-offs between the objective of FW reduction and other objectives pursued by marketing standards. To structure and validate solutions (re-balancing) that alleviate the negative impacts of marketing standards to FW, while balancing the trade-offs with their other objectives.
4. To improve market access and business potential of foods that do not meet marketing standards but are still safe to eat (suboptimal foods), by: (i) guiding food businesses in selecting appropriate marketing channels and business models, and assisting them in quantifying their business value; (ii) fostering change in consumers’ and businesses’ attitudes towards sub-optimal foods, through nudging marketing cues.
5. To effectively manage the upscaling of the project results by: (i) developing operational guidelines and policy recommendations on how to prevent/reduce FW due to marketing standards, and thereby contributing to environmental sustainability and circularity of the food system; (ii) formulating a Code of Conduct balancing commercial and social value from suboptimal foods, and thereby contributing to economic sustainability and food poverty reduction; (iii) developing a strategy for the exploitation of key project results by the project partners (individually and jointly); (iv) undertaking appropriate dissemination and communication actions to maximize the project’s impact; (v) establishing formal agreements (MoUs) with relevant projects to achieve impact synergies.
