Final Report Summary - TRANSPARENT_FOOD (Quality and integrity in food: a challenge for chain communication and research)
Executive summary:
Transparency in the food sector and especially towards consumers is one of the priority issues on the agenda of consumer policy and consumer representatives. Food scandals and deficiencies in consumer communication have raised consumers' requests for being informed. The requests for improved transparency are also due to increasing interests of consumers and policy in food that is not only safe and of the quality they expect but that matches evolving expectations that food production is based on processes that limit negative impacts on the environment and consider social concerns.
The project was aimed at dealing with such issues and to identify research activities and needs for initiatives that could contribute to reaching an understanding on:
a) what could be considered as present or future best practice in transparency and
b) what are knowledge deficiencies that limit developments towards this status and required research to overcome.
Through collaborative efforts by leading experts from 11 Universities and Research Institutes covering a wide range of research disciplines, the project has captured the present state-of-the-art and deficiencies that required research activities in a number of extensive reports. The analysis involved the review of literature, projects, experiences, and communication with stakeholders through surveys and workshops. A specific initiative involved the analysis of 'best practice' examples which demonstrate proven working levels of transparency.
Project Context and Objectives:
It was the general objective of the project Transparent_Food to 'contribute to the development of transparency in the sector by supporting understanding of its complexities, identifying the present state-of-the-art, learning from experiences, making stakeholders aware, specifying deficiencies and research needs, and formulating a research framework for facilitating future research initiatives'.
This general objective was captured in the following four concrete and verifiable project objectives:
1. Identification of the state-of-the art on transparency knowledge and understanding:
This objective was served by a compendium on the state-of-the-art on present knowledge and understanding of transparency needs, transparency solutions, and transparency potentials as derived from research and best practice experiences.
2. Identification of deficiencies in stakeholder transparency and needs for future research initiatives:
This objective was served by a strategic research agenda based on a research framework for the identification of transparency deficiencies, research needs, and research priorities.
3. Providing transparency uptake support:
This objective was served by the specification of a 'blueprint' information backbone scheme (representing an agreement on information exchange between system providers regarding technology and content) that could support the development of a European communication network and facilitate interaction between existing and developing transparency initiatives.
4. Developing transparency awareness:
This objective was served by the establishment of a transparency platform and dedicated dissemination initiatives with stakeholders on a European scale.
Concept and framework for reaching the objectives
For its analysis, the project utilized a broad range of approaches, including literature analysis, best practice analysis, chain analysis, work group discussions, expert discussions, surveys, web consultations, and simulation studies to reach results that serve the objectives. The different approaches were linked to a framework which guided the analysis and provided the basis for future transparency research. The framework for analysis built on a 'layer approach' that accounts for the complexity in transparency discussions.
With this view, the framework distinguished the following four information layers:
1. The 1st layer (bottom layer) provided the communication infrastructure and served tracking and tracing needs. This level included the technical, organizational and managerial prerequisites for successful transparency developments, also involving agreements on communication standards and communication units.
2. The 2nd layer served the collection of information about the various project domains (food safety, food quality, chain integrity). This layer represented the classical information collection and communication approach.
3. The 3rd layer involved the transformation of information into signals which served the transparency needs of the various stakeholders (consumers, enterprises, and policy).
4. The 4th layer characterized the transparency needs of consumers, enterprises, and policy and considers differences that were due to, a.o. the different situations they were in, including cultural background, market environment, responsibilities etc.
The different work packages beyond project management covered the following fields:
WP2: Feasibility and traceability
This work package dealt with the basic framework layer 'Infrastructure and Multi-Dimensional Tracking and Tracing Needs'. This work package links up (work group) with the various stakeholders in the provision of baseline system solutions, especially solutions that assure tracking and tracing capability and allow its extension with transparency information. This involved system providers, the providers of technical, organizational and communicational standards (GS1, agroXML etc.), and European projects related to tracking and tracing problems. It identified the potential, pre-conditions, barriers, and agreement requirements for an open European backbone system that distinguishes different levels of development and could provide the basis for a first (lowest level) transparency network on which all further transparency developments could build.
WP3: Quality and Safety; WP4: Integrity and Sustainability
These work packages dealt with the information layer and focus, after organization of the work group, on the specification of information and information layers with relevance for food safety and quality or for environmental, ethical or social concerns. They involved literature reviews, the analysis and documentation of monitoring and reporting schemes, and expert consultations on the specification of the information layers in the respective domains (across the various stages of the chain and the various product lines) and on the identification of research needs and priorities.
WP5: Signals for transparency and trust
This work package aimed at the analysis and development of appropriate signals and their information base for transparency and trust, considering different product lines and the diversity in expectations and cultural background. It stood out in covering a very broad range of signals and needs involving consumers, industry, and policy and focusing on food quality, food safety and chain integrity. These various aspects have been integrated into one work package because of the very close interrelationships between them. As an example, consumer signals needed to be related to industry signals as industry enterprises have to take market requirements into account in their procurement and production policy but they might also relate to policy interests. The work package built on a work group with two subgroups that focus on consumers and policy needs, respectively. The WP involved literature reviews, the analysis and evaluation of certification and of existing/proposed signaling schemes, and expert consultations on signal needs with corresponding information requirements and on the identification of research needs and priorities.
WP6: Best practice and performance
This work package dealt with the identification and analysis of experiences from Best Practice and provided the focus link with professional associations and stakeholder platforms for communication and exchange. It built on a specification of 'best practice' with a view on food safety, quality and chain integrity. It involved literature reviews as well as the analysis, documentation and evaluation of best practice solutions implemented in enterprises with certain quality visibility, implemented in chains, or offered by European system providers (based on a previous comprehensive analysis of the market).
WP7: Integration and Coordination
This work package built on a work group involving all partners and work group leaders. It fully relied on the summary expertise of the partner group. It was the crucial integrator for all of the project's results including a comprehensive and integrated documentation of the present situation and knowledge related to transparency and the formulation of a strategic research agenda for the elimination of knowledge barriers. It provided the common approach for analysis and documentation and took responsibility for the integration of work package results into the requested comprehensive views. The work package established a common European Transparency Platform that integrated stakeholders, provided networking and provided the basis for the uptake of developments. The work package also coordinated web consultations, one of the crucial elements to reach broad acceptance of results.
WP8: Exploiting and Dissemination of Results
This work package built on a work group involving all project partners. It dealt not only with the dissemination of results but provided the focus link with national stakeholder platforms and professional associations. It provided publications for stakeholders (as e.g. transparency development guides, best practice guides), distributed the Strategic Research Agenda, assured the communication of results to stakeholder associations via the European Transparency Platform and through direct approach, and organized in cooperation with partners a number of focused European workshops for stakeholders and associations, system providers, certification and monitoring schemes, research organisations and associations, and for representatives from policy and institutions with transparency links and responsibilities.
Project Results:
The main results from the project Transparent_Food followed a 'layer approach' that accounts for the complexity in transparency discussions. This was complemented by presentations based on an integrated view that included best practice experiences from food value chains and some issues of generic nature. In the identification of transparency challenges evolving from a discrepancy between needs, state-of-the-art, and experiences that was presented in the following part and in-depth was discussed in the 'Strategic Research Agenda', which has utilized a broad range of approaches, including literature analysis, best practice analysis, chain analysis, work group discussions, expert discussions, surveys, web consultations, and simulation studies to reach results that served the objectives.
The 'Strategic Research Agenda' and the main results from the project are still acceptable on the project website http://www.transparentfood.eu/.
Another main result was the establishment of the European Transparency Platform, which is still operational under the following website: http://www.transfood.eu/. Its purpose was to provide a tool for the dialogue with the stakeholders on food transparency. All stakeholders could use it for improving their knowledge and understanding on food transparency systems.
Transparency Challenge 1: Transparency for trust in food safety
Scope and state of the art
The analysis of the current situation regarding food safety demands (regulations, commercially-applied specifications, consumer perceptions) was the basis for the following analysis and evaluation of hot spots of transparency issues in the food chain. This analysis built on a detailed description of the food chain and a structured description of major transparency issues related to food safety and Knorr et al., 2011. A number of key thematic areas were identified, namely emerging risks, emerging technologies, food safety governance, and the parallel economy.
Emerging risks: It was well established that intentional and unintentional alterations in practices of primary production such as harvesting, sourcing, preservation, processing, packaging, etc. might have consequences in the production of or the selection for new, unforeseen risks. Likewise new analytical and other scientific capacities could identify, or make more explicit, risks which had previously been unrecognised. It was known that consumers had particularly strong and deeply felt concerns about chemical contamination with delayed pathological effects. Food contact materials were examples of potential sources of exposure to hazards of this type which were, where recognised as representing a risk, highly controlled. Certain packaging systems in which food contact was accentuated were indeed specifically demanded by supermarkets (e.g. individual, blister and vacuum packs for the cold chain, interleaved sliced hams, and cheeses). The consequences of emerging risks in the food chain varied according to the specifics but there were certain scenarios which were similar for any of the sources of such risks.
New technologies: New technologies included, but were not limited to, the physical processing technologies some of which have been developed and extensively studied over the past few years. In some cases, the technology itself was not novel at all but the application presented was (such as the shelf-life extending combinations of microfiltration and pasteurization in milk). Where the application of a novel technology and its communication to the consumer could provide a competitive advantage, its link with food safety issues might lead to considerable transparency challenges. As an option, one might directly mention food safety in communication with consumers, although this was known to be rare at present. It was more common that only some parts of the message might allude to food safety aspects such as the extension of shelf life or the limitation in the use of additives in production. For many novel technologies, elements of potential interest for consumers such as indicators of the impact on food safety of food processing (process parameters) or data capture, were still incompletely defined.
Food Safety Governance: Since the publication of the White Paper on Food Safety in 2000, all legislation relevant to food safety has been in the form of regulations. This implied the direct incorporation of the EU legislation into the legal systems of the member states. The capacity of individual member stated to implement and apply this legislation varies considerably for a number of reasons. The EC supported comparative implementation through the Food and Veterinary Office (FVO). This approach was highly transparent - with all relevant reports and replies being published in web form. Variations in the application of legislation were thus tending to diminish over time but some were undeniably remain, including those which are embedded in cultural customs.
Parallel economy: The parallel economy was characterized by distribution activities outside the classical channels as e.g. farmers' markets. The inherent variability in the stringency and rigor of implementing food safety legislation due to cultural diversity and economic differences contributed to considerable differences in the way in which the parallel economy operated in the various member states. There might be variations due to differences in opportunities for food sales via the parallel economy - both by differences in the ability to providing appropriate agricultural produce as well by differences in the capacity of subsequent stages for serving parallel economy activities.
Furthermore, there were variations in the way the parallel economy was perceived by different groups of consumers. One could expect a spectrum of degrees of acceptance of foods being produced and distributed without passing through the formal economy. This was likely to be influenced, at least in part, by regional and national factors. In rural and rurally-influenced communities, food which was locally produced and perceived as 'natural' or traditional was often perceived of being superior to food purchased in the formal economy. In urbanized areas the existence of an infrastructure of ethnical restaurants and food services building on food prepared according to traditions from all over the world might add to the risks of food safety in parallel economies.
Goal 1: Addressing transparency issues related to emerging food safety risks
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To understand the perception of consumers of messages they received concerning the appearance of new risks related to food and to understand how and to what degree consumers could accept new risks without losing confidence in the chain.
Challenge 2: To assure that emerging risks were both technically and scientifically identified as early as possible and that all relevant information was communicated to stakeholders in ways which were appropriate to them.
Goal 2: To ensure that transparency issues did not impede emerging technologies from achieving their potential
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To more fully understand how consumers perceived the use of new technologies in the food chain and how their perception affected their trust in food safety.
Challenge 2: An expanded and improved definition of the safety contribution of new technologies. This should not be limited to the stage of the food chain in which the technology intervenes, but also to potential impacts on food safety of the food chain as a whole.
Goal 3: Providing a fair and functional governance of food safety
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To understand in detail the differences in the way governance practices were employed by the official agencies responsible for food safety in the EU member states and their component regional structures. These practices needed to be compared and contrasted with governance practices employed by modern retailers, branded wholesalers, brand holders who employed contract manufacture, and by modern large scale restaurant chains.
Challenge 2: To understand the differences in the stringency of the criteria applied in the application of food safety legislation across the EU. In this case it was not the practices and capacities themselves which were of interest but rather the actual realizations of process and product specifications which were deemed to be acceptable or not-acceptable.
Goal 4: Understanding the effects of the parallel economy on food safety
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To understand the role of cultural and regional diversity in the development of the parallel economy in the EU. It was known that different cultures view the parallel economy in different ways. While some were relatively permissive others do strongly reject it.
Challenge 2: To understand the impact of unregulated labour on food safety. Many hygiene-sensitive jobs, particularly but not exclusively, in retail and food service, were unskilled and poorly paid.
Transparency Challenge 2: Transparency for trust in food quality
Scope and state of the art
Food quality was a crucial success factor in order to maintain high standard products. An appropriate transparency was a key success factor for the ability of the food chain actors to guarantee a maximum level of food quality. This was due to the complexity of the food chain which might consist of multiple single stages from the production of raw material by agriculture up to the final distribution by retailers. In addition to the many stages, the food sector was characterized by a great variety of food products and processes as well as by numerous regulations regarding food quality. Furthermore, as food production was not dominated by a few global corporations but builds on a multitude of SMEs, its complexity involved organizational particularities including cultural diversity.
Goal 1: Food chain - Better integration from farm to fork
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Managing the higher degree of complexity for multi ingredient products was a challenge that involves the traceability of complex product streams that might extend over the whole globe as well as the monitoring of quality parameters. New technologies needed to be developed that allow an automated, cross-stage and gap-less monitoring as well as an easy transmission of relevant data.
Challenge 2: Optimising the interaction between all members of the chain and selecting the data needed to create or maintain trust and transparency. Market and consumer research programs were of crucial relevance in this context and for evaluating the relevance of information to be communicated.
Challenge 3: Consideration of post-shopping consumer behavior for maintaining quality as a basis for transparency on food quality and quality development. Food handling at the point of sale and at the point of use by consumers had a major impact on product quality.
Challenge 4: Realising interdisciplinary co-operation between the different stakeholders, organisations and research institutes dealing with transparency in food quality.
Goal 2: Traditional and emerging technologies: A synchronized assessment
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Re-evaluation of traditional food processing. Re-inventing these processes required the understanding of the traditional process mechanisms and subsequently their transfer and upgrading to modern industrial processes. A re-evaluation of existing technologies from a food quality pointed of view seems essential. Novel processes had to undergo an intensive evaluation regarding toxicological risks etc. There was no systematic approach for the existing traditional foods and certain critical points e.g. the formation of acrylamide were only revealed accidently.
Challenge 2: Integrative food process optimization. An effective integrated modeling of food chains and enterprise units was required for generating and validating information regarding changes in food quality during food production, storage, retailing, and point-of-use. Issues such as packaging technology played a crucial role for quality changes in logistic, for freshness and for food safety.
Challenge 3: The establishment of a synchronized process assessment scheme including the development of criteria for the analysis and evaluation of process performance of emerging technologies. The lack of information on inactivation kinetics and reaction mechanisms of nutrients, toxins, allergens, microbes and viruses, shelf-life studies, epidemiological studies, effects on digestibility, on allergens, phytochemicals and melanoidins clearly indicated further research needs regarding emerging food processing technologies but also regarding traditional food processing.
Challenge 4: The development of manageable industrial scale technologies for translating consumer perceptions into innovative products was a key step for the further successful development and integration of emerging technologies.
Goal 3: Analytical methods: Improving speed, detection limits and process adaptation
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: With regard to emerging technologies, a re-evaluation of current analytical means were necessary in order to prove their suitability to characterize relevant process-product interactions.
Challenge 2: Fast and non-destructive methods with appropriate detection limits. Speed enhancements in terms of sample throughput and analytical time requirements were necessary in order to increase the total amount of samples tested and to improve the response time.
Goal 4: Improving food quality standards and making provisions more stringent
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Advances in scientific knowledge and the development of new analytical methods were the basis for improvements in food quality and safety and should be implemented into the requirements of quality and safety standards without delay in order to guarantee optimal food quality at any time.
Challenge 2: Clear, unambiguous provisions in labeling. Surveillance reports showed that major deficiencies regarding requirements and consumer complaints were related to labelling. Although, a step in the right direction was made by adopting the new European food information regulation, much more stringent legal provisions were needed for preventing loopholes and for improving the reliability of food labeling. The transformation of available product and process related quality information into signals related to consumer information needs remained a core task.
Transparency Challenge 3: Transparency for trust in food chain integrity
Scope and state of the art
Ethical, social and environmental impacts were important for building trust in the food chain, yet they could not be measured on the food product as such. Thus the integrity of the food chain relating to these aspects had to build on transparency.
The minimisation of negative impacts and the enhancing of positive impacts of social, ethical and environmental aspects of food chains were increasingly becoming important values around which food choices were made. Communication of these values relied to a great extent on processes of transparency. These processes were varied but could rely on tracking and tracing in combination with the use of clear, simple and up to date information communicated in an effective way. The following built on an analysis of the state-of-the-art on information use in food chains with relevance for environmental concerns (Oestergren et al., 2010; project report D4.1) as well as for ethical and social concerns (Barling et al., 2010; project report D4.2) and on an analysis, evaluation and documentation of selected 'best practice' monitoring and reporting schemes (Ostergren et al., 2011; project report D4.3).
On a company basis the transparency of environmental, ethical social aspects was addressed in two ways. First, by business to consumer communication by labeling food that was supposed to have certain integrity characteristics, like carbon footprint or fair trade. Second, by business to business information that ensures that certain standards have been used in producing the goods used in the further processing. One example was GlobalG.A.P. that ensures that food was produced on the farm by using state-of-art Good Agricultural Practices aiming at reducing detrimental environmental impacts of farming operations, reducing the use of chemical inputs and ensuring a responsible approach to worker health and safety as well as animal welfare.
At the policy scale EU had implemented the integrated product policy (IPP) which sought to minimise environmental impact from products by looking at all phases of a life-cycle and taking action where it was most effective. To achieve this objective, the EU IPP was contributing to addressing the environmental challenges identified in both the Sustainable Development Strategy and the Sixth Environment Action Programme. The IPP principles had been taken up and carried over by the Sustainable Consumption and Production and Sustainable Industrial Policy (SCP/SIP) Action Plan which in turns constituted a major input to the ten-year framework of the UN/UNEP programmes on sustainable production and consumption. It was a key assumption of the IPP that the environmental performance of a product or a service could be a factor giving companies or their products a competitive edge, and thus it was a separate aim of the IPP to create the right framework for market conditions that favor environmental improvements in the product chain. An increased transparency in the food chain was crucial to reach this goal.
Another important policy initiative was the Life Cycle Initiative which was launched by UNEP and SETAC .This international life cycle partnership has identified the need for guidelines for social life cycle assessment of products to complement environmental life cycle assessment and life cycle costing, and by doing so contributing to the full assessment of goods and services within the context of sustainable development. December 2010 the European Council invited the Commission to develop a common methodology on the quantitative assessment of environmental impacts of products, throughout their life-cycle, in order to support the assessment and labeling of products. A communication on this methodology should be adopted in 2012, as part of the revision of the SCP/SIP Action Plan.
Furthermore, the Commission was currently undertaking a study to explore the feasibility of establishing reliable EU Ecolabel criteria for food and feed products. In parallel, the European food supply chain had gathered around the European Food Sustainable Consumption and Production Round Table (RT), an initiative with the objective to establish the food chain as a major contributor towards sustainable consumption and production in Europe by developing a harmonized framework methodology for the voluntary environmental assessment and communication of environmental information along the food chain, including to consumers. The RT had just recently (August 2011) carried out a scientific workshop, hosted by the EU Joint Research Centre, to discuss methodological issues and recommendations. In their draft conclusions, the RT called for targeted research efforts to better understand consumer perception, understanding and action on environmental product information, and for the development of specific guidance on communicating the environmental performance of products.
Goal 1: Valid indicators for estimating the integrity performance within an operational and sound traceability reference unit
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Establishment of a sound, manageable and robust framework that pointed out the relevant aspects to take into account when choosing the traceability reference unit in different types of food chains and covering different integrity dimensions in order to harmonize indicator calculations.
Challenge 2: Methodology to describe different integrity dimensions with appropriate indicators needed to be developed. The fact that different dimensions of integrity did not have the same relevance for all food products needs to be taken into account (e.g. animal welfare).
Goal 2: Cost effective systems for data collection and sharing that take advantage of existing data collected through a food chain
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Establishment of a framework for cost effective systems for data sharing that allowed connection to a relevant traceability reference unit and allowed a timely and transparent update of process information and a reasonable degree of open access for all interested parties.
Challenge 2: Identification of barriers and opportunities for making inspection results from rule based systems publicly available in a meaningful way.
Goal 3: Robust concepts for guaranteeing the integrity performance of different food chains
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: In depth understanding on how existing schemes and their rules and practices translated into true impacts that could be communicated to the consumer and to provide feedback to the owners of the schemes.
Challenge 2: Establishment of criteria to be used in guidelines for external reviews and assessment of schemes in order to facilitate comparability between schemes and over time.
Challenge 3: To develop a framework for information management along the food chain for increased integrity, trust and business opportunities.
Transparency Challenge 4: Signaling information to build confidence and trust in the food chain
Scope and state of the art
The objective was to identify information that related to environmental, ethical, and social impacts of actions and processes in the food chain, and so to determine the potential, the deficiencies, and the research needs. This allowed the food chain to transmit information related to such impacts towards consumers and policy.
Greater and more appropriate forms of transparency in food chains were a potential facilitator for innovation and change to more sustainable food chains and a more sustainable food system. That was a food system that was more sustainable environmentally, socially and ethically, and, ultimately, economically. Information in food chains and the transmission of that information in ways that were effective through being informative and understandable to the recipients could result in public policy desired behavior change by the food chain and by consumers. Measurable improvements in sustainability impacts were facilitated by improved and suitable transparency.
Food chains needed to move towards transparency that promoted the disclosure of relevant and usable information from food chains to the wider public. Such transparency provided more symmetry in information flows and allowed the sustainability metrics and methods employed to improve over time as the information becomes more relevant to better environmental and social outcomes. That was, the information signaled resulted in greater public understanding of the sustainability attributes of food products and so facilitate informed choice by consumers of more sustainable food in their purchasing. The signals deployed to consumers were largely in the forms of on product labels and logos (such as based on certification schemes) as well as in store information and information campaigns, and business advice called lines for customers.
The signaling of such relevant information to the public and consumers involved a complex set of processes of transmission. Our understanding needs to go beyond the simple and predominant business-to-business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) models. Equally important were the transmissions of information from business to business and then on to the consumer (B2B2C). Also, rapidly emerging was the importance of social networks in relying consumer-to-consumer information and opinion (C2C). Hence a more realistic transmission sequence of information that was recurring, and that transparency has to enlighten, was the B2B2C & C2C transmission of information. Furthermore, there were other social and professional intermediaries who interacted with the public and impact upon the information flow to consumers. Civil Society Organizations, such as NGOs, sought to influence consumers' knowledge and decisions through information campaigns, usually from a particular value perspective (e.g. animal welfare). Professional groups might offer information such as veterinarians and animal welfare, or nutritionists and dieticians, either as independent professional bodies and networks, but usually not from within the food chain unless as employees of the food industry.
Goal 1: A more sustainable food chain that utilised transparency in signaling its sustainability criteria from business to business and on to the consumer
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To adopt efficient methods of communicating sustainable food choices from the food chain to the consuming public through the effective promotion of appropriate information transmission and signals from the food chain.
Goal 2: Providing signals around the environmental, social and ethical aspects of food that were understood by consumers and respond to their needs
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To identify effective ways of making food chains transparent to the growing demands for information disclosure.
Goal 3: Establishing consumer trust (the role of the media) and managing the transition to greater transparency
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: How to establish and manage consumer trust, taking into account the role of the media in this process and how managing the transition to greater transparency.
Goal 4: The development and utilization of technologies to facilitate the flows of information and transmission of signals thus enabling better transparency
Major Research Challenge
Challenge 1: To adapt and promote the application of new ICTs that enabled and facilitated the potential purchase of sustainable food by the public.
Challenge 2: To unlock hidden information for utilization by consumers. Products were increasingly linked to labels or certificates of any kind (e.g. eco labels, quality labels). Labels were usually representatives of clusters of information regarding controls, process organizations, product compositions, origins, etc. Intelligent IT devices in consumers' hands such as smartphones might link up with the respective label owners through e.g. the internet cloud for unlocking the hidden information.
Transparency Challenge 5: Technological baseline infrastructure for tracking and tracing
Scope and state of the art
To facilitate management of production chains, information technology supported tracking and tracing and quality assurance systems had been developed and applied also in the food sector. Existing solutions currently in most cases focused on a certain production chain or a part of a chain. This had led to a number of information exchange islands with barriers and media breaks between systems. In reality, changes in supply chain configurations and interconnections between chains led to the transformation of the linear structure into a highly dynamic food sector network. Interoperation of different tracking and tracing systems was thus a prerequisite for appropriate food sector transparency. There was currently no solution available that was suited to all stakeholders within the food sector and that satisfied the requirement of being able to track and trace according to different scopes of a chain.
Within the food sector, a broad diversity of enterprise size distribution characteristics across countries and across different stages of the food chain could be found. While the larger enterprises commonly were small in numbers but contributed a relatively large part to the economic outcome and to the percentage of bound labor force, small enterprises still played a major role in various stages of the food sector, especially in primary production and specialized retail stores. With this regard, the sector differed from other industries like e. g. the electronics sector, where there were almost no small enterprises present in the supply chain or the automotive sector, where there were lots of medium sized enterprises in the pre-production parts deliverer stage of the chain and a small number of very large corporate enterprises doing final assembly. An important challenge in drafting a backbone solution specification worked thus out how the scalability requirements resulting from the sector structure could be achieved. Methods and technologies used had to accommodate on the one hand large amounts of smaller data packages and on the other hand a large number of small stakeholders.
Goal 1: Making different subdomain level data encodings interoperate
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Creating universal food sector domain ontology by networking subdomain models implicitly given in existing standards, vocabularies and coding systems. Finding technical methods to automatically map content of information and data packages to alternative representations, data formats and information models by using this domain model.
Goal 2: Feasible identification of holdings, production sites and units and sound definition of traceability reference units in primary production
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Developing good practices for handling traceability reference units that had a change history with regard to properties that might influence the product carried within/upon. Creating an identification scheme based upon a reference information model of change history and proposing an appropriate distribution of responsibility for holding and storing information on TRU properties.
Goal 3: Supporting balancing of demands for confidentiality versus demands of open information
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Establishing a food sector stakeholder role system, that supported network participants' individual information and confidentiality requirements but on the other hand was feasible to be implemented in an economic manner. Providing a distributed infrastructure to support that role system within a tracking and tracing backbone.
Goal 4: Sector wide economic and technical feasibility of a baseline information infrastructure
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Developing low-cost, commodity hardware technology based solutions to support SMEs in tracking and tracing. Identifying a suitable business model for service provision within such an environment.
Transparency Challenge 6: Integration
Scope and state of the art
Transparency was one of the most complex and fuzzy issues the food sector was facing. It was widely acknowledged that an appropriate transparency was of crucial importance and a critical success factor for 1) sustainable development 2) guaranteeing food safety and quality 3) providing consumers with information to support their buying behavior and 4) identifying a suitable regulatory environment.
Consequently, transparency was one of the most popular concepts within chain management in general and within food chain management in particular. However, researchers as well as practitioners often raised the question of whether the more transparency the better. To answer this question, one needed to analyze good practice experiences regarding food chain transparency.
Given the economic (e.g. employment, added value), ecological (e.g. food miles) and ethical (e.g. animal welfare, fair trade) importance of the agri-food business, one of the objectives of the TRANSPARENT FOOD project was to compile a good practice inventory regarding food chain transparency and to analyze selected good practices in-depth to:
(1) help making the concept of transparency more understandable,
(2) provide useful examples from different transparency domains (e.g. food safety, food sustainability etc.),
(3) illustrate the difficulties of transparency,
(4) provide good practice experiences that have proven themselves over time to reach transparency in the food chain,
(5) provide good practice experiences where the optimal level of transparency could be delivered more effectively with fewer problems and unforeseen complications,
(6) provide useful examples to improve the average performance of existing transparency systems, and
(7) provide useful examples for all stakeholders within the food chain to develop new transparency systems.
Hereby, we focused on transparency needs of consumers, industry and policy towards food safety, food quality, food origin and food sustainability (environmental, social and economic issues).
Goal 1: Developing optimal transparency systems
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To understand the problem the transparency system tries to address and to identify the goals of the transparency systems: For whom did we want to create value? There was no agreement on how to measure the performance of transparency systems, or how to develop an optimal transparency system. Still, performance could generally be defined as the extent to which goals were achieved. Consequently, evaluation of performance of transparency systems (development of optimal transparency systems) remained incomplete or impossible if the achievement of goals was not taken into account.
Challenge 2: To understand the differences in stakeholders' interest regarding transparency. In addition to commonly shared interests, conflicting interests of stakeholders might also coexist in transparency systems. The interests of stakeholders were said to be conflicting if they could hinder the achievement of other stakeholders interest. As such, in order to develop an optimal transparency system, the common and conflicting interests of stakeholders should be evaluated, because optimal transparency systems should build on the common interests of stakeholders, while addressed the conflicting interests in the same time.
Challenge 3: To identify the optimal level of information to obtain optimal transparency instead of complete transparency (superfluous information).
Challenge 4: To identify how the optimal level of information could be realized. Firstly, one needed to determine the required governance structures that encourage reaching optimal transparency that effectively and consistently evaluated transparency performance and provided sufficient support and direction through implementation. Secondly, the responsibilities of the different stakeholders needed to be defined. Thirdly, the determination of the return on investment of realizing optimal transparency. Fourthly, after identifying the optimal level of transparency, it was important to have a look at not only information quantity but also information quality (reliability, accessibility etc.).
Goal 2: Understanding cost and benefits of transparency systems
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To identify the costs and benefits for the different transparency domains (e.g. food safety, food sustainability etc.): How were the costs and benefits distributed in the chain? Was there a balanced distribution?
Challenge 2: To identify local, national, international (EU) and global cost and benefits of transparency systems to determine the value of transparency systems and to analyze possible valorization on third markets (e.g. North America, Asia).
Challenge 3: To identify the determinants of limited transparency (e.g. trust, power, dependency etc.) and its effect on costs and benefits. For example, lack of communication skills (e.g. not communicating typical failures, weaknesses, and recommended behavior in crisis situations) could result in limited transparency systems.
Challenge 4: To determine how to create a balanced distribution of costs and benefits: What governance structures were required, with public and market responsibilities? Who should lead/be the initiator?
Challenge 5: To compare internationally (within EU) transparency systems, and to identify the effect of different control systems and different (non) coercive systems on the competitive position.
Goal 3: Creating multi-target transparency systems
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To determine how the different targets could be bundled into one denominator. Transparency systems that focused on one only target, for example carbon footprint (ecological transparency), could be easily evaluated. Multi-target transparency systems, on the contrary, target different aspects which made it difficult to evaluate the performance. Therefore, it was important to define a denominator which included the different aspects of the multi-target transparency system. Moreover, it was important to investigate management tools for the different stakeholders and how to deal with conflicting targets.
Challenge 2: To determine how one needed to communicate with different stakeholders (from farm to fork) when dealing with multi-target transparency systems. When more than one aspect was targeted in a transparency system, a clear communication process was essential to prevent confusing messages.
Challenge 3: To extend food safety towards other management practices: Quality signs for transparency. The objective would be to extend food safety, which focused up till now mostly on labeling and accreditation, towards management practices which included risk and productivity/operations management. Hereby, the question was how this could be realized in the food sector, and more specifically how this could be realized by SMEs.
Goal 4: Identifying best practice transparency systems as reference systems for future scenarios
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Provided chain information reference processes that constituted future best practice cases for transparency in various scenarios. Based on present best practice such reference processes provided enterprises and policy with a guideline on where to move. This could facilitate communication between chain members and the enterprise investment decisions towards the future.
Challenge 2: Provided a roadmap towards future reference processes. Developments in transparency were a dynamic process where investments support a stepwise improvement. This required the identification of suitable development stages that balance transparency priorities with investment opportunities for various types of chains considering reach (local, global) and major product alternatives.
Transparency Challenge 7: Communication with stakeholders and media
Scope and state of the art
For serving the transparency needs of consumers related to the sometimes complex characteristics of food products and food processes, value focused, simple, clear and easy to understand messages were necessary. An information overload caused by too many details communicated to consumers who were usually not food experts might result in confusion, involve the risk that key messages were being overlooked, and might endanger their perception of being properly informed. As a consequence, information for consumers had to be aggregated (in whatever form) and transformed into a simplified message. However, the message had to be linked with background information that included the details the message built on and that might be requested by consumers. This was a well-established approach in literature where it was being referred to as 'drill-down' capability.
Goal 1: Improving the access of stakeholders to transparency information
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To understand the preferences of different stakeholder groups for different communication channels, communication tools and communication formats such as languages and audio-visual opportunities considering present and emerging technologies incl. those of the Future Internet. Analysing the effects of alternatives on perception and trust.
Goal 2: Organizational specification of efficient and balanced transparency systems with fitting levels of detail
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To understand the motivators of different consumer groups for requesting transparency information and to develop methods for determination of the optimal level of details of transparency information to consumers, policy makers, and media.
Challenge 2: To understand which factors influenced the fair balance between transparency needs of the recipients and the needs of the information providers.
Challenge 3: To evaluate the impact of the efficiency of transparency communication.
Goal 3: Improving the exchange of transparency information between consumers and SMEs
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To improve the capabilities and facilities of SMEs for communication of transparency information.
Challenge 2: To improve consumers' understanding of the concept and use of transparency.
Goal 4: Establishing open innovation exchange between consumers and members of the chain at various stages of the chain
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Analysing and evaluating open innovation concepts for suitability regarding innovations in transparency in different scenarios. Identification and experimental evaluation of most suitable concepts for utilization in industry.
Transparency Challenge 8: Dealing with claims and data ownership
Scope and state of the art
Data and claims had in common that they were based on ownership. The use of data as well as the use of claims was subject to approval by owners. Furthermore, if used by actors in the chain, the utilization required some understanding of their reliability.
Data ownership (see also Schiefer, 2010; project report D7.2) was a critical issue in the food sector. As the distribution of data ownership did usually not match the power balance in chains, it was a source of tension and debate. Data could be owned by individual enterprises, by groups of enterprises, or by the public. Presently, transparency interests had a major view on data potentially available from agriculture. This included prominent subject areas as carbon emissions, animal welfare, use of pesticides, etc. The collection of data was connected with costs, their use with benefits. Furthermore, data provided by actors in the chain could be used by other members of the chain against their interest. This was part of the debate on the provision and use of data between agriculture, industry and retail.
Goal 1: Substantiation of claims
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Development of a concept on the specification of the reliability of claims. Using claims from whatever sources in the development of transparency systems required a unified evaluation approach of the control and guarantee system behind the claims. Such an approach was a pre-requisite for motivating enterprises and consumers to accept claims as part of a trusted transparency system.
Challenge 2: Substantiation of the reliability of commonly used claims in the food sector and the analysis of costs and reliability benefits of different control and guarantee systems behind the claims.
Goal 2: Protecting and considering data ownership
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: With increasing interest in transparency, the provision of data became an important issue in competitiveness. It was necessary to understand the added value of data and to relate them to the costs of collection, transformation and communication. This could open the way for the development of information markets where the provision of data was evaluated (and priced) in accordance with costs.
Challenge 2: The power balance in chains was a source of distrust which could be overcome by contract schemes and organizational developments especially linked to agriculture. Similar challenges were being faced by other SMEs in the chain. However, it was especially relevant for agriculture as one of the major provider of information with relevance for transparency. It was envisaged that model arrangements developed for this stage in the chain could be transferred to other groups as well.
Goal 3: Designing markets for information and claims
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Understanding different options for the organization of information markets that fitted the specific needs of SMEs in trading of information for use in transparency systems. Analysed, simulated and evaluated newly emerging options that utilized state-of-the-art information technology and might serve customers in the chain as well as data base service providers that might offer data of more generic nature to third parties outside the customer range of the data provider.
Challenge 2: Understanding different options for the organization of markets of claims that were based on initiatives by major providers of claims such as providers of certificates dealing with quality, environmental, social or ethical issues. Analysed, simulated and evaluated newly emerging options that utilized state-of-the-art information technology and provided transparency all along the chain and also towards consumers. This incorporated explicitly market opportunities with consumers that might e.g. subscribed to receiving transparency on the reliability and background of claims.
Transparency Challenge 9: Coordination and cooperation initiatives
Scope and state of the art
A prerequisite for making transparency work was the assurance that all enterprises along the chain adhere to the requirements of a suitable chain information process and were able to link up with their suppliers and customers for appropriate information exchange. Even if information processes had been clearly defined, enterprises still needed to be coordinated in their efforts and to have the technological, organizational, and intellectual capability as well as the legal and contractual right to collect, process, provide, and communicate the requested information.
Goal 1: Identifying suitable organizational infrastructures for coordination support towards increasing transparency in the sector
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Identification of major barriers towards increased in transparency and identification of potential blueprints for possible organizational infrastructures in support of transparency. This might involve new private or public institutional initiatives or organizational developments within the sector.
Goal 2: Reaching a sector status in information availability and information handling that fits transparency needs and efficiency requirements
Major research challenges
- Challenge 1: Determining the indicators for a suitable analyswas of 'T-readiness'. Analyzing and mapping the actual level of 'E-readiness' and 'T-readiness' at enterprise and sector level in the sector. Identification of possible layers of feasible enterprise networks with fitting T-readiness.
- Challenge 2: Analysing needs for investments and initiatives on enterprise and sector level for moving upwards in layers, e.g. moving from a lower to a higher level of T-readiness. Analysing costs and benefits of selected (content specific) transparency systems of different layers and specification of the benefit-cost ratio of moving from lower to higher levels of T-readiness on enterprise and sector level.
Potential Impact:
The ultimate goal of the project was to contributing to the long-term sustainability and competitiveness of the food sector in serving consumers with food that meets their expectations now and in the future within the dynamically changing environmental, social and ethical framework set by society.
The project's immediate contribution to this goal was on supporting the elimination of sector deficiencies in providing transparency to consumers, policy and enterprises along the chain which would enable 'informed decisions' and an 'informed appreciation' of the sector's efforts towards sustainability at all levels. Deficiencies in transparency are considered one of the crucial barriers in sector developments towards sustainability which are not just of relevance for food but with the crucial relevance of food production for the society, of broad societal implications not just in Europe but on a global scale.
The lack of a European approach has been limiting the development of systems that could support transparency on a broad scale, e.g. involving the many small and medium sized enterprises active in the sector. There have been many past efforts to provide solutions for the 'transparency problem'. None of them proved to be successful beyond the immediate project environment, primarily due to remaining deficiencies in the system approach required for solving the transparency problem in the dynamically changing network situation of the food sector with its many SMEs.
The project aimed at providing transparency in deficiencies that required attention for making a sector wide transparency solution feasible. A small illustration of one of the domains under consideration should clarify the situation. There have been a number of projects dealing with the establishment of tracking and tracing systems in food. However, there is not yet any agreed communication standard that allows exchange of data between agriculture, industry and retail, a base requirement for any communication system. Similar deficiencies are in communication with consumers, in concepts for dealing with data ownership etc. etc.
Main dissemination activities and exploitation of results
For optimal dissemination and exploitation of the project's results to the stakeholders in the European food sector, the project organized a broad initiative for improvements in transparency, which has been reached through a broad awareness on opportunities, needs and the value of transparency for the sustainable development of the sector. The following initiatives have been created:
1. BEST PRACTICE INVENTORY ON FOOD TRANSPARENCY
The inventory contains descriptions of successful cases of food transparency systems. These cases can be used by the food businesses as a source of practical information to build up and improve their transparency systems. The inventory is freely available.
2. BEST PRACTICE GUIDE ON FOOD TRANSPARENCY
The objective of the guide is to provide practical advice to food businesses to build up and improve their transparency systems and to policy makers in designing policy measures to improve transparency for consumers. All potential users can have a free access to the guide. The owners can use it for contract work for food businesses and in other research projects. CCH and UBO use already this knowledge in the SmartAgriFood FP7 project.
3. TRAINING PACKAGE ON FOOD TRANSPARENCY
The objective of the training package is to provide the basis for systematic knowledge transfer on food transparency. The owner will provide training on fee paying basis. The project partners can have a free access right from the owner to deliver the course. Other interested organisations can have an access right to deliver the course by individual agreements. Expected impact includes improved knowledge on transparency practices and better legislation leading to better information of consumers enabling their informed decisions.
4. STRATEGIC RESEARCH AGENDA ON FOOD TRANSPARENCY
The purpose of the exploitable foreground is identifying the directions and topics of future research and to provide input for the EU and national research programmes.
5. EUROPEAN TRANSPARENCY PLATFORM
The purpose of the European Transparency Platform is to provide a tool for the dialogue with the stakeholders on food transparency. All stakeholders can use it for improving their knowledge and understanding on food transparency systems.
6. BLUEPRINT PROPOSAL FOR EUROPEAN BACKBONE SOLUTION
The purpose of the foreground is to provide a knowledge base for standardisation of the ICT infrastructure for food transparency systems. KTBL and UBO can use it for contract work and further research including the SmartAgriFood project.
List of Websites:
http://www.transparentfood.eu
prof. Dr. Gerhard Schiefer
university of Bonn
department of Food and Resource Economics
chair for Business Management, Organization and Information Management
meckenheimer Allee 174
D-53115 Bonn
germany
E-mail: schiefer@uni-bonn.de
phone: +49-228-733500
fax: +49-228-733431
Transparency in the food sector and especially towards consumers is one of the priority issues on the agenda of consumer policy and consumer representatives. Food scandals and deficiencies in consumer communication have raised consumers' requests for being informed. The requests for improved transparency are also due to increasing interests of consumers and policy in food that is not only safe and of the quality they expect but that matches evolving expectations that food production is based on processes that limit negative impacts on the environment and consider social concerns.
The project was aimed at dealing with such issues and to identify research activities and needs for initiatives that could contribute to reaching an understanding on:
a) what could be considered as present or future best practice in transparency and
b) what are knowledge deficiencies that limit developments towards this status and required research to overcome.
Through collaborative efforts by leading experts from 11 Universities and Research Institutes covering a wide range of research disciplines, the project has captured the present state-of-the-art and deficiencies that required research activities in a number of extensive reports. The analysis involved the review of literature, projects, experiences, and communication with stakeholders through surveys and workshops. A specific initiative involved the analysis of 'best practice' examples which demonstrate proven working levels of transparency.
Project Context and Objectives:
It was the general objective of the project Transparent_Food to 'contribute to the development of transparency in the sector by supporting understanding of its complexities, identifying the present state-of-the-art, learning from experiences, making stakeholders aware, specifying deficiencies and research needs, and formulating a research framework for facilitating future research initiatives'.
This general objective was captured in the following four concrete and verifiable project objectives:
1. Identification of the state-of-the art on transparency knowledge and understanding:
This objective was served by a compendium on the state-of-the-art on present knowledge and understanding of transparency needs, transparency solutions, and transparency potentials as derived from research and best practice experiences.
2. Identification of deficiencies in stakeholder transparency and needs for future research initiatives:
This objective was served by a strategic research agenda based on a research framework for the identification of transparency deficiencies, research needs, and research priorities.
3. Providing transparency uptake support:
This objective was served by the specification of a 'blueprint' information backbone scheme (representing an agreement on information exchange between system providers regarding technology and content) that could support the development of a European communication network and facilitate interaction between existing and developing transparency initiatives.
4. Developing transparency awareness:
This objective was served by the establishment of a transparency platform and dedicated dissemination initiatives with stakeholders on a European scale.
Concept and framework for reaching the objectives
For its analysis, the project utilized a broad range of approaches, including literature analysis, best practice analysis, chain analysis, work group discussions, expert discussions, surveys, web consultations, and simulation studies to reach results that serve the objectives. The different approaches were linked to a framework which guided the analysis and provided the basis for future transparency research. The framework for analysis built on a 'layer approach' that accounts for the complexity in transparency discussions.
With this view, the framework distinguished the following four information layers:
1. The 1st layer (bottom layer) provided the communication infrastructure and served tracking and tracing needs. This level included the technical, organizational and managerial prerequisites for successful transparency developments, also involving agreements on communication standards and communication units.
2. The 2nd layer served the collection of information about the various project domains (food safety, food quality, chain integrity). This layer represented the classical information collection and communication approach.
3. The 3rd layer involved the transformation of information into signals which served the transparency needs of the various stakeholders (consumers, enterprises, and policy).
4. The 4th layer characterized the transparency needs of consumers, enterprises, and policy and considers differences that were due to, a.o. the different situations they were in, including cultural background, market environment, responsibilities etc.
The different work packages beyond project management covered the following fields:
WP2: Feasibility and traceability
This work package dealt with the basic framework layer 'Infrastructure and Multi-Dimensional Tracking and Tracing Needs'. This work package links up (work group) with the various stakeholders in the provision of baseline system solutions, especially solutions that assure tracking and tracing capability and allow its extension with transparency information. This involved system providers, the providers of technical, organizational and communicational standards (GS1, agroXML etc.), and European projects related to tracking and tracing problems. It identified the potential, pre-conditions, barriers, and agreement requirements for an open European backbone system that distinguishes different levels of development and could provide the basis for a first (lowest level) transparency network on which all further transparency developments could build.
WP3: Quality and Safety; WP4: Integrity and Sustainability
These work packages dealt with the information layer and focus, after organization of the work group, on the specification of information and information layers with relevance for food safety and quality or for environmental, ethical or social concerns. They involved literature reviews, the analysis and documentation of monitoring and reporting schemes, and expert consultations on the specification of the information layers in the respective domains (across the various stages of the chain and the various product lines) and on the identification of research needs and priorities.
WP5: Signals for transparency and trust
This work package aimed at the analysis and development of appropriate signals and their information base for transparency and trust, considering different product lines and the diversity in expectations and cultural background. It stood out in covering a very broad range of signals and needs involving consumers, industry, and policy and focusing on food quality, food safety and chain integrity. These various aspects have been integrated into one work package because of the very close interrelationships between them. As an example, consumer signals needed to be related to industry signals as industry enterprises have to take market requirements into account in their procurement and production policy but they might also relate to policy interests. The work package built on a work group with two subgroups that focus on consumers and policy needs, respectively. The WP involved literature reviews, the analysis and evaluation of certification and of existing/proposed signaling schemes, and expert consultations on signal needs with corresponding information requirements and on the identification of research needs and priorities.
WP6: Best practice and performance
This work package dealt with the identification and analysis of experiences from Best Practice and provided the focus link with professional associations and stakeholder platforms for communication and exchange. It built on a specification of 'best practice' with a view on food safety, quality and chain integrity. It involved literature reviews as well as the analysis, documentation and evaluation of best practice solutions implemented in enterprises with certain quality visibility, implemented in chains, or offered by European system providers (based on a previous comprehensive analysis of the market).
WP7: Integration and Coordination
This work package built on a work group involving all partners and work group leaders. It fully relied on the summary expertise of the partner group. It was the crucial integrator for all of the project's results including a comprehensive and integrated documentation of the present situation and knowledge related to transparency and the formulation of a strategic research agenda for the elimination of knowledge barriers. It provided the common approach for analysis and documentation and took responsibility for the integration of work package results into the requested comprehensive views. The work package established a common European Transparency Platform that integrated stakeholders, provided networking and provided the basis for the uptake of developments. The work package also coordinated web consultations, one of the crucial elements to reach broad acceptance of results.
WP8: Exploiting and Dissemination of Results
This work package built on a work group involving all project partners. It dealt not only with the dissemination of results but provided the focus link with national stakeholder platforms and professional associations. It provided publications for stakeholders (as e.g. transparency development guides, best practice guides), distributed the Strategic Research Agenda, assured the communication of results to stakeholder associations via the European Transparency Platform and through direct approach, and organized in cooperation with partners a number of focused European workshops for stakeholders and associations, system providers, certification and monitoring schemes, research organisations and associations, and for representatives from policy and institutions with transparency links and responsibilities.
Project Results:
The main results from the project Transparent_Food followed a 'layer approach' that accounts for the complexity in transparency discussions. This was complemented by presentations based on an integrated view that included best practice experiences from food value chains and some issues of generic nature. In the identification of transparency challenges evolving from a discrepancy between needs, state-of-the-art, and experiences that was presented in the following part and in-depth was discussed in the 'Strategic Research Agenda', which has utilized a broad range of approaches, including literature analysis, best practice analysis, chain analysis, work group discussions, expert discussions, surveys, web consultations, and simulation studies to reach results that served the objectives.
The 'Strategic Research Agenda' and the main results from the project are still acceptable on the project website http://www.transparentfood.eu/.
Another main result was the establishment of the European Transparency Platform, which is still operational under the following website: http://www.transfood.eu/. Its purpose was to provide a tool for the dialogue with the stakeholders on food transparency. All stakeholders could use it for improving their knowledge and understanding on food transparency systems.
Transparency Challenge 1: Transparency for trust in food safety
Scope and state of the art
The analysis of the current situation regarding food safety demands (regulations, commercially-applied specifications, consumer perceptions) was the basis for the following analysis and evaluation of hot spots of transparency issues in the food chain. This analysis built on a detailed description of the food chain and a structured description of major transparency issues related to food safety and Knorr et al., 2011. A number of key thematic areas were identified, namely emerging risks, emerging technologies, food safety governance, and the parallel economy.
Emerging risks: It was well established that intentional and unintentional alterations in practices of primary production such as harvesting, sourcing, preservation, processing, packaging, etc. might have consequences in the production of or the selection for new, unforeseen risks. Likewise new analytical and other scientific capacities could identify, or make more explicit, risks which had previously been unrecognised. It was known that consumers had particularly strong and deeply felt concerns about chemical contamination with delayed pathological effects. Food contact materials were examples of potential sources of exposure to hazards of this type which were, where recognised as representing a risk, highly controlled. Certain packaging systems in which food contact was accentuated were indeed specifically demanded by supermarkets (e.g. individual, blister and vacuum packs for the cold chain, interleaved sliced hams, and cheeses). The consequences of emerging risks in the food chain varied according to the specifics but there were certain scenarios which were similar for any of the sources of such risks.
New technologies: New technologies included, but were not limited to, the physical processing technologies some of which have been developed and extensively studied over the past few years. In some cases, the technology itself was not novel at all but the application presented was (such as the shelf-life extending combinations of microfiltration and pasteurization in milk). Where the application of a novel technology and its communication to the consumer could provide a competitive advantage, its link with food safety issues might lead to considerable transparency challenges. As an option, one might directly mention food safety in communication with consumers, although this was known to be rare at present. It was more common that only some parts of the message might allude to food safety aspects such as the extension of shelf life or the limitation in the use of additives in production. For many novel technologies, elements of potential interest for consumers such as indicators of the impact on food safety of food processing (process parameters) or data capture, were still incompletely defined.
Food Safety Governance: Since the publication of the White Paper on Food Safety in 2000, all legislation relevant to food safety has been in the form of regulations. This implied the direct incorporation of the EU legislation into the legal systems of the member states. The capacity of individual member stated to implement and apply this legislation varies considerably for a number of reasons. The EC supported comparative implementation through the Food and Veterinary Office (FVO). This approach was highly transparent - with all relevant reports and replies being published in web form. Variations in the application of legislation were thus tending to diminish over time but some were undeniably remain, including those which are embedded in cultural customs.
Parallel economy: The parallel economy was characterized by distribution activities outside the classical channels as e.g. farmers' markets. The inherent variability in the stringency and rigor of implementing food safety legislation due to cultural diversity and economic differences contributed to considerable differences in the way in which the parallel economy operated in the various member states. There might be variations due to differences in opportunities for food sales via the parallel economy - both by differences in the ability to providing appropriate agricultural produce as well by differences in the capacity of subsequent stages for serving parallel economy activities.
Furthermore, there were variations in the way the parallel economy was perceived by different groups of consumers. One could expect a spectrum of degrees of acceptance of foods being produced and distributed without passing through the formal economy. This was likely to be influenced, at least in part, by regional and national factors. In rural and rurally-influenced communities, food which was locally produced and perceived as 'natural' or traditional was often perceived of being superior to food purchased in the formal economy. In urbanized areas the existence of an infrastructure of ethnical restaurants and food services building on food prepared according to traditions from all over the world might add to the risks of food safety in parallel economies.
Goal 1: Addressing transparency issues related to emerging food safety risks
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To understand the perception of consumers of messages they received concerning the appearance of new risks related to food and to understand how and to what degree consumers could accept new risks without losing confidence in the chain.
Challenge 2: To assure that emerging risks were both technically and scientifically identified as early as possible and that all relevant information was communicated to stakeholders in ways which were appropriate to them.
Goal 2: To ensure that transparency issues did not impede emerging technologies from achieving their potential
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To more fully understand how consumers perceived the use of new technologies in the food chain and how their perception affected their trust in food safety.
Challenge 2: An expanded and improved definition of the safety contribution of new technologies. This should not be limited to the stage of the food chain in which the technology intervenes, but also to potential impacts on food safety of the food chain as a whole.
Goal 3: Providing a fair and functional governance of food safety
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To understand in detail the differences in the way governance practices were employed by the official agencies responsible for food safety in the EU member states and their component regional structures. These practices needed to be compared and contrasted with governance practices employed by modern retailers, branded wholesalers, brand holders who employed contract manufacture, and by modern large scale restaurant chains.
Challenge 2: To understand the differences in the stringency of the criteria applied in the application of food safety legislation across the EU. In this case it was not the practices and capacities themselves which were of interest but rather the actual realizations of process and product specifications which were deemed to be acceptable or not-acceptable.
Goal 4: Understanding the effects of the parallel economy on food safety
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To understand the role of cultural and regional diversity in the development of the parallel economy in the EU. It was known that different cultures view the parallel economy in different ways. While some were relatively permissive others do strongly reject it.
Challenge 2: To understand the impact of unregulated labour on food safety. Many hygiene-sensitive jobs, particularly but not exclusively, in retail and food service, were unskilled and poorly paid.
Transparency Challenge 2: Transparency for trust in food quality
Scope and state of the art
Food quality was a crucial success factor in order to maintain high standard products. An appropriate transparency was a key success factor for the ability of the food chain actors to guarantee a maximum level of food quality. This was due to the complexity of the food chain which might consist of multiple single stages from the production of raw material by agriculture up to the final distribution by retailers. In addition to the many stages, the food sector was characterized by a great variety of food products and processes as well as by numerous regulations regarding food quality. Furthermore, as food production was not dominated by a few global corporations but builds on a multitude of SMEs, its complexity involved organizational particularities including cultural diversity.
Goal 1: Food chain - Better integration from farm to fork
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Managing the higher degree of complexity for multi ingredient products was a challenge that involves the traceability of complex product streams that might extend over the whole globe as well as the monitoring of quality parameters. New technologies needed to be developed that allow an automated, cross-stage and gap-less monitoring as well as an easy transmission of relevant data.
Challenge 2: Optimising the interaction between all members of the chain and selecting the data needed to create or maintain trust and transparency. Market and consumer research programs were of crucial relevance in this context and for evaluating the relevance of information to be communicated.
Challenge 3: Consideration of post-shopping consumer behavior for maintaining quality as a basis for transparency on food quality and quality development. Food handling at the point of sale and at the point of use by consumers had a major impact on product quality.
Challenge 4: Realising interdisciplinary co-operation between the different stakeholders, organisations and research institutes dealing with transparency in food quality.
Goal 2: Traditional and emerging technologies: A synchronized assessment
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Re-evaluation of traditional food processing. Re-inventing these processes required the understanding of the traditional process mechanisms and subsequently their transfer and upgrading to modern industrial processes. A re-evaluation of existing technologies from a food quality pointed of view seems essential. Novel processes had to undergo an intensive evaluation regarding toxicological risks etc. There was no systematic approach for the existing traditional foods and certain critical points e.g. the formation of acrylamide were only revealed accidently.
Challenge 2: Integrative food process optimization. An effective integrated modeling of food chains and enterprise units was required for generating and validating information regarding changes in food quality during food production, storage, retailing, and point-of-use. Issues such as packaging technology played a crucial role for quality changes in logistic, for freshness and for food safety.
Challenge 3: The establishment of a synchronized process assessment scheme including the development of criteria for the analysis and evaluation of process performance of emerging technologies. The lack of information on inactivation kinetics and reaction mechanisms of nutrients, toxins, allergens, microbes and viruses, shelf-life studies, epidemiological studies, effects on digestibility, on allergens, phytochemicals and melanoidins clearly indicated further research needs regarding emerging food processing technologies but also regarding traditional food processing.
Challenge 4: The development of manageable industrial scale technologies for translating consumer perceptions into innovative products was a key step for the further successful development and integration of emerging technologies.
Goal 3: Analytical methods: Improving speed, detection limits and process adaptation
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: With regard to emerging technologies, a re-evaluation of current analytical means were necessary in order to prove their suitability to characterize relevant process-product interactions.
Challenge 2: Fast and non-destructive methods with appropriate detection limits. Speed enhancements in terms of sample throughput and analytical time requirements were necessary in order to increase the total amount of samples tested and to improve the response time.
Goal 4: Improving food quality standards and making provisions more stringent
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Advances in scientific knowledge and the development of new analytical methods were the basis for improvements in food quality and safety and should be implemented into the requirements of quality and safety standards without delay in order to guarantee optimal food quality at any time.
Challenge 2: Clear, unambiguous provisions in labeling. Surveillance reports showed that major deficiencies regarding requirements and consumer complaints were related to labelling. Although, a step in the right direction was made by adopting the new European food information regulation, much more stringent legal provisions were needed for preventing loopholes and for improving the reliability of food labeling. The transformation of available product and process related quality information into signals related to consumer information needs remained a core task.
Transparency Challenge 3: Transparency for trust in food chain integrity
Scope and state of the art
Ethical, social and environmental impacts were important for building trust in the food chain, yet they could not be measured on the food product as such. Thus the integrity of the food chain relating to these aspects had to build on transparency.
The minimisation of negative impacts and the enhancing of positive impacts of social, ethical and environmental aspects of food chains were increasingly becoming important values around which food choices were made. Communication of these values relied to a great extent on processes of transparency. These processes were varied but could rely on tracking and tracing in combination with the use of clear, simple and up to date information communicated in an effective way. The following built on an analysis of the state-of-the-art on information use in food chains with relevance for environmental concerns (Oestergren et al., 2010; project report D4.1) as well as for ethical and social concerns (Barling et al., 2010; project report D4.2) and on an analysis, evaluation and documentation of selected 'best practice' monitoring and reporting schemes (Ostergren et al., 2011; project report D4.3).
On a company basis the transparency of environmental, ethical social aspects was addressed in two ways. First, by business to consumer communication by labeling food that was supposed to have certain integrity characteristics, like carbon footprint or fair trade. Second, by business to business information that ensures that certain standards have been used in producing the goods used in the further processing. One example was GlobalG.A.P. that ensures that food was produced on the farm by using state-of-art Good Agricultural Practices aiming at reducing detrimental environmental impacts of farming operations, reducing the use of chemical inputs and ensuring a responsible approach to worker health and safety as well as animal welfare.
At the policy scale EU had implemented the integrated product policy (IPP) which sought to minimise environmental impact from products by looking at all phases of a life-cycle and taking action where it was most effective. To achieve this objective, the EU IPP was contributing to addressing the environmental challenges identified in both the Sustainable Development Strategy and the Sixth Environment Action Programme. The IPP principles had been taken up and carried over by the Sustainable Consumption and Production and Sustainable Industrial Policy (SCP/SIP) Action Plan which in turns constituted a major input to the ten-year framework of the UN/UNEP programmes on sustainable production and consumption. It was a key assumption of the IPP that the environmental performance of a product or a service could be a factor giving companies or their products a competitive edge, and thus it was a separate aim of the IPP to create the right framework for market conditions that favor environmental improvements in the product chain. An increased transparency in the food chain was crucial to reach this goal.
Another important policy initiative was the Life Cycle Initiative which was launched by UNEP and SETAC .This international life cycle partnership has identified the need for guidelines for social life cycle assessment of products to complement environmental life cycle assessment and life cycle costing, and by doing so contributing to the full assessment of goods and services within the context of sustainable development. December 2010 the European Council invited the Commission to develop a common methodology on the quantitative assessment of environmental impacts of products, throughout their life-cycle, in order to support the assessment and labeling of products. A communication on this methodology should be adopted in 2012, as part of the revision of the SCP/SIP Action Plan.
Furthermore, the Commission was currently undertaking a study to explore the feasibility of establishing reliable EU Ecolabel criteria for food and feed products. In parallel, the European food supply chain had gathered around the European Food Sustainable Consumption and Production Round Table (RT), an initiative with the objective to establish the food chain as a major contributor towards sustainable consumption and production in Europe by developing a harmonized framework methodology for the voluntary environmental assessment and communication of environmental information along the food chain, including to consumers. The RT had just recently (August 2011) carried out a scientific workshop, hosted by the EU Joint Research Centre, to discuss methodological issues and recommendations. In their draft conclusions, the RT called for targeted research efforts to better understand consumer perception, understanding and action on environmental product information, and for the development of specific guidance on communicating the environmental performance of products.
Goal 1: Valid indicators for estimating the integrity performance within an operational and sound traceability reference unit
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Establishment of a sound, manageable and robust framework that pointed out the relevant aspects to take into account when choosing the traceability reference unit in different types of food chains and covering different integrity dimensions in order to harmonize indicator calculations.
Challenge 2: Methodology to describe different integrity dimensions with appropriate indicators needed to be developed. The fact that different dimensions of integrity did not have the same relevance for all food products needs to be taken into account (e.g. animal welfare).
Goal 2: Cost effective systems for data collection and sharing that take advantage of existing data collected through a food chain
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Establishment of a framework for cost effective systems for data sharing that allowed connection to a relevant traceability reference unit and allowed a timely and transparent update of process information and a reasonable degree of open access for all interested parties.
Challenge 2: Identification of barriers and opportunities for making inspection results from rule based systems publicly available in a meaningful way.
Goal 3: Robust concepts for guaranteeing the integrity performance of different food chains
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: In depth understanding on how existing schemes and their rules and practices translated into true impacts that could be communicated to the consumer and to provide feedback to the owners of the schemes.
Challenge 2: Establishment of criteria to be used in guidelines for external reviews and assessment of schemes in order to facilitate comparability between schemes and over time.
Challenge 3: To develop a framework for information management along the food chain for increased integrity, trust and business opportunities.
Transparency Challenge 4: Signaling information to build confidence and trust in the food chain
Scope and state of the art
The objective was to identify information that related to environmental, ethical, and social impacts of actions and processes in the food chain, and so to determine the potential, the deficiencies, and the research needs. This allowed the food chain to transmit information related to such impacts towards consumers and policy.
Greater and more appropriate forms of transparency in food chains were a potential facilitator for innovation and change to more sustainable food chains and a more sustainable food system. That was a food system that was more sustainable environmentally, socially and ethically, and, ultimately, economically. Information in food chains and the transmission of that information in ways that were effective through being informative and understandable to the recipients could result in public policy desired behavior change by the food chain and by consumers. Measurable improvements in sustainability impacts were facilitated by improved and suitable transparency.
Food chains needed to move towards transparency that promoted the disclosure of relevant and usable information from food chains to the wider public. Such transparency provided more symmetry in information flows and allowed the sustainability metrics and methods employed to improve over time as the information becomes more relevant to better environmental and social outcomes. That was, the information signaled resulted in greater public understanding of the sustainability attributes of food products and so facilitate informed choice by consumers of more sustainable food in their purchasing. The signals deployed to consumers were largely in the forms of on product labels and logos (such as based on certification schemes) as well as in store information and information campaigns, and business advice called lines for customers.
The signaling of such relevant information to the public and consumers involved a complex set of processes of transmission. Our understanding needs to go beyond the simple and predominant business-to-business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) models. Equally important were the transmissions of information from business to business and then on to the consumer (B2B2C). Also, rapidly emerging was the importance of social networks in relying consumer-to-consumer information and opinion (C2C). Hence a more realistic transmission sequence of information that was recurring, and that transparency has to enlighten, was the B2B2C & C2C transmission of information. Furthermore, there were other social and professional intermediaries who interacted with the public and impact upon the information flow to consumers. Civil Society Organizations, such as NGOs, sought to influence consumers' knowledge and decisions through information campaigns, usually from a particular value perspective (e.g. animal welfare). Professional groups might offer information such as veterinarians and animal welfare, or nutritionists and dieticians, either as independent professional bodies and networks, but usually not from within the food chain unless as employees of the food industry.
Goal 1: A more sustainable food chain that utilised transparency in signaling its sustainability criteria from business to business and on to the consumer
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To adopt efficient methods of communicating sustainable food choices from the food chain to the consuming public through the effective promotion of appropriate information transmission and signals from the food chain.
Goal 2: Providing signals around the environmental, social and ethical aspects of food that were understood by consumers and respond to their needs
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To identify effective ways of making food chains transparent to the growing demands for information disclosure.
Goal 3: Establishing consumer trust (the role of the media) and managing the transition to greater transparency
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: How to establish and manage consumer trust, taking into account the role of the media in this process and how managing the transition to greater transparency.
Goal 4: The development and utilization of technologies to facilitate the flows of information and transmission of signals thus enabling better transparency
Major Research Challenge
Challenge 1: To adapt and promote the application of new ICTs that enabled and facilitated the potential purchase of sustainable food by the public.
Challenge 2: To unlock hidden information for utilization by consumers. Products were increasingly linked to labels or certificates of any kind (e.g. eco labels, quality labels). Labels were usually representatives of clusters of information regarding controls, process organizations, product compositions, origins, etc. Intelligent IT devices in consumers' hands such as smartphones might link up with the respective label owners through e.g. the internet cloud for unlocking the hidden information.
Transparency Challenge 5: Technological baseline infrastructure for tracking and tracing
Scope and state of the art
To facilitate management of production chains, information technology supported tracking and tracing and quality assurance systems had been developed and applied also in the food sector. Existing solutions currently in most cases focused on a certain production chain or a part of a chain. This had led to a number of information exchange islands with barriers and media breaks between systems. In reality, changes in supply chain configurations and interconnections between chains led to the transformation of the linear structure into a highly dynamic food sector network. Interoperation of different tracking and tracing systems was thus a prerequisite for appropriate food sector transparency. There was currently no solution available that was suited to all stakeholders within the food sector and that satisfied the requirement of being able to track and trace according to different scopes of a chain.
Within the food sector, a broad diversity of enterprise size distribution characteristics across countries and across different stages of the food chain could be found. While the larger enterprises commonly were small in numbers but contributed a relatively large part to the economic outcome and to the percentage of bound labor force, small enterprises still played a major role in various stages of the food sector, especially in primary production and specialized retail stores. With this regard, the sector differed from other industries like e. g. the electronics sector, where there were almost no small enterprises present in the supply chain or the automotive sector, where there were lots of medium sized enterprises in the pre-production parts deliverer stage of the chain and a small number of very large corporate enterprises doing final assembly. An important challenge in drafting a backbone solution specification worked thus out how the scalability requirements resulting from the sector structure could be achieved. Methods and technologies used had to accommodate on the one hand large amounts of smaller data packages and on the other hand a large number of small stakeholders.
Goal 1: Making different subdomain level data encodings interoperate
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Creating universal food sector domain ontology by networking subdomain models implicitly given in existing standards, vocabularies and coding systems. Finding technical methods to automatically map content of information and data packages to alternative representations, data formats and information models by using this domain model.
Goal 2: Feasible identification of holdings, production sites and units and sound definition of traceability reference units in primary production
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Developing good practices for handling traceability reference units that had a change history with regard to properties that might influence the product carried within/upon. Creating an identification scheme based upon a reference information model of change history and proposing an appropriate distribution of responsibility for holding and storing information on TRU properties.
Goal 3: Supporting balancing of demands for confidentiality versus demands of open information
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Establishing a food sector stakeholder role system, that supported network participants' individual information and confidentiality requirements but on the other hand was feasible to be implemented in an economic manner. Providing a distributed infrastructure to support that role system within a tracking and tracing backbone.
Goal 4: Sector wide economic and technical feasibility of a baseline information infrastructure
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Developing low-cost, commodity hardware technology based solutions to support SMEs in tracking and tracing. Identifying a suitable business model for service provision within such an environment.
Transparency Challenge 6: Integration
Scope and state of the art
Transparency was one of the most complex and fuzzy issues the food sector was facing. It was widely acknowledged that an appropriate transparency was of crucial importance and a critical success factor for 1) sustainable development 2) guaranteeing food safety and quality 3) providing consumers with information to support their buying behavior and 4) identifying a suitable regulatory environment.
Consequently, transparency was one of the most popular concepts within chain management in general and within food chain management in particular. However, researchers as well as practitioners often raised the question of whether the more transparency the better. To answer this question, one needed to analyze good practice experiences regarding food chain transparency.
Given the economic (e.g. employment, added value), ecological (e.g. food miles) and ethical (e.g. animal welfare, fair trade) importance of the agri-food business, one of the objectives of the TRANSPARENT FOOD project was to compile a good practice inventory regarding food chain transparency and to analyze selected good practices in-depth to:
(1) help making the concept of transparency more understandable,
(2) provide useful examples from different transparency domains (e.g. food safety, food sustainability etc.),
(3) illustrate the difficulties of transparency,
(4) provide good practice experiences that have proven themselves over time to reach transparency in the food chain,
(5) provide good practice experiences where the optimal level of transparency could be delivered more effectively with fewer problems and unforeseen complications,
(6) provide useful examples to improve the average performance of existing transparency systems, and
(7) provide useful examples for all stakeholders within the food chain to develop new transparency systems.
Hereby, we focused on transparency needs of consumers, industry and policy towards food safety, food quality, food origin and food sustainability (environmental, social and economic issues).
Goal 1: Developing optimal transparency systems
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To understand the problem the transparency system tries to address and to identify the goals of the transparency systems: For whom did we want to create value? There was no agreement on how to measure the performance of transparency systems, or how to develop an optimal transparency system. Still, performance could generally be defined as the extent to which goals were achieved. Consequently, evaluation of performance of transparency systems (development of optimal transparency systems) remained incomplete or impossible if the achievement of goals was not taken into account.
Challenge 2: To understand the differences in stakeholders' interest regarding transparency. In addition to commonly shared interests, conflicting interests of stakeholders might also coexist in transparency systems. The interests of stakeholders were said to be conflicting if they could hinder the achievement of other stakeholders interest. As such, in order to develop an optimal transparency system, the common and conflicting interests of stakeholders should be evaluated, because optimal transparency systems should build on the common interests of stakeholders, while addressed the conflicting interests in the same time.
Challenge 3: To identify the optimal level of information to obtain optimal transparency instead of complete transparency (superfluous information).
Challenge 4: To identify how the optimal level of information could be realized. Firstly, one needed to determine the required governance structures that encourage reaching optimal transparency that effectively and consistently evaluated transparency performance and provided sufficient support and direction through implementation. Secondly, the responsibilities of the different stakeholders needed to be defined. Thirdly, the determination of the return on investment of realizing optimal transparency. Fourthly, after identifying the optimal level of transparency, it was important to have a look at not only information quantity but also information quality (reliability, accessibility etc.).
Goal 2: Understanding cost and benefits of transparency systems
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To identify the costs and benefits for the different transparency domains (e.g. food safety, food sustainability etc.): How were the costs and benefits distributed in the chain? Was there a balanced distribution?
Challenge 2: To identify local, national, international (EU) and global cost and benefits of transparency systems to determine the value of transparency systems and to analyze possible valorization on third markets (e.g. North America, Asia).
Challenge 3: To identify the determinants of limited transparency (e.g. trust, power, dependency etc.) and its effect on costs and benefits. For example, lack of communication skills (e.g. not communicating typical failures, weaknesses, and recommended behavior in crisis situations) could result in limited transparency systems.
Challenge 4: To determine how to create a balanced distribution of costs and benefits: What governance structures were required, with public and market responsibilities? Who should lead/be the initiator?
Challenge 5: To compare internationally (within EU) transparency systems, and to identify the effect of different control systems and different (non) coercive systems on the competitive position.
Goal 3: Creating multi-target transparency systems
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To determine how the different targets could be bundled into one denominator. Transparency systems that focused on one only target, for example carbon footprint (ecological transparency), could be easily evaluated. Multi-target transparency systems, on the contrary, target different aspects which made it difficult to evaluate the performance. Therefore, it was important to define a denominator which included the different aspects of the multi-target transparency system. Moreover, it was important to investigate management tools for the different stakeholders and how to deal with conflicting targets.
Challenge 2: To determine how one needed to communicate with different stakeholders (from farm to fork) when dealing with multi-target transparency systems. When more than one aspect was targeted in a transparency system, a clear communication process was essential to prevent confusing messages.
Challenge 3: To extend food safety towards other management practices: Quality signs for transparency. The objective would be to extend food safety, which focused up till now mostly on labeling and accreditation, towards management practices which included risk and productivity/operations management. Hereby, the question was how this could be realized in the food sector, and more specifically how this could be realized by SMEs.
Goal 4: Identifying best practice transparency systems as reference systems for future scenarios
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Provided chain information reference processes that constituted future best practice cases for transparency in various scenarios. Based on present best practice such reference processes provided enterprises and policy with a guideline on where to move. This could facilitate communication between chain members and the enterprise investment decisions towards the future.
Challenge 2: Provided a roadmap towards future reference processes. Developments in transparency were a dynamic process where investments support a stepwise improvement. This required the identification of suitable development stages that balance transparency priorities with investment opportunities for various types of chains considering reach (local, global) and major product alternatives.
Transparency Challenge 7: Communication with stakeholders and media
Scope and state of the art
For serving the transparency needs of consumers related to the sometimes complex characteristics of food products and food processes, value focused, simple, clear and easy to understand messages were necessary. An information overload caused by too many details communicated to consumers who were usually not food experts might result in confusion, involve the risk that key messages were being overlooked, and might endanger their perception of being properly informed. As a consequence, information for consumers had to be aggregated (in whatever form) and transformed into a simplified message. However, the message had to be linked with background information that included the details the message built on and that might be requested by consumers. This was a well-established approach in literature where it was being referred to as 'drill-down' capability.
Goal 1: Improving the access of stakeholders to transparency information
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To understand the preferences of different stakeholder groups for different communication channels, communication tools and communication formats such as languages and audio-visual opportunities considering present and emerging technologies incl. those of the Future Internet. Analysing the effects of alternatives on perception and trust.
Goal 2: Organizational specification of efficient and balanced transparency systems with fitting levels of detail
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To understand the motivators of different consumer groups for requesting transparency information and to develop methods for determination of the optimal level of details of transparency information to consumers, policy makers, and media.
Challenge 2: To understand which factors influenced the fair balance between transparency needs of the recipients and the needs of the information providers.
Challenge 3: To evaluate the impact of the efficiency of transparency communication.
Goal 3: Improving the exchange of transparency information between consumers and SMEs
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: To improve the capabilities and facilities of SMEs for communication of transparency information.
Challenge 2: To improve consumers' understanding of the concept and use of transparency.
Goal 4: Establishing open innovation exchange between consumers and members of the chain at various stages of the chain
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Analysing and evaluating open innovation concepts for suitability regarding innovations in transparency in different scenarios. Identification and experimental evaluation of most suitable concepts for utilization in industry.
Transparency Challenge 8: Dealing with claims and data ownership
Scope and state of the art
Data and claims had in common that they were based on ownership. The use of data as well as the use of claims was subject to approval by owners. Furthermore, if used by actors in the chain, the utilization required some understanding of their reliability.
Data ownership (see also Schiefer, 2010; project report D7.2) was a critical issue in the food sector. As the distribution of data ownership did usually not match the power balance in chains, it was a source of tension and debate. Data could be owned by individual enterprises, by groups of enterprises, or by the public. Presently, transparency interests had a major view on data potentially available from agriculture. This included prominent subject areas as carbon emissions, animal welfare, use of pesticides, etc. The collection of data was connected with costs, their use with benefits. Furthermore, data provided by actors in the chain could be used by other members of the chain against their interest. This was part of the debate on the provision and use of data between agriculture, industry and retail.
Goal 1: Substantiation of claims
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Development of a concept on the specification of the reliability of claims. Using claims from whatever sources in the development of transparency systems required a unified evaluation approach of the control and guarantee system behind the claims. Such an approach was a pre-requisite for motivating enterprises and consumers to accept claims as part of a trusted transparency system.
Challenge 2: Substantiation of the reliability of commonly used claims in the food sector and the analysis of costs and reliability benefits of different control and guarantee systems behind the claims.
Goal 2: Protecting and considering data ownership
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: With increasing interest in transparency, the provision of data became an important issue in competitiveness. It was necessary to understand the added value of data and to relate them to the costs of collection, transformation and communication. This could open the way for the development of information markets where the provision of data was evaluated (and priced) in accordance with costs.
Challenge 2: The power balance in chains was a source of distrust which could be overcome by contract schemes and organizational developments especially linked to agriculture. Similar challenges were being faced by other SMEs in the chain. However, it was especially relevant for agriculture as one of the major provider of information with relevance for transparency. It was envisaged that model arrangements developed for this stage in the chain could be transferred to other groups as well.
Goal 3: Designing markets for information and claims
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Understanding different options for the organization of information markets that fitted the specific needs of SMEs in trading of information for use in transparency systems. Analysed, simulated and evaluated newly emerging options that utilized state-of-the-art information technology and might serve customers in the chain as well as data base service providers that might offer data of more generic nature to third parties outside the customer range of the data provider.
Challenge 2: Understanding different options for the organization of markets of claims that were based on initiatives by major providers of claims such as providers of certificates dealing with quality, environmental, social or ethical issues. Analysed, simulated and evaluated newly emerging options that utilized state-of-the-art information technology and provided transparency all along the chain and also towards consumers. This incorporated explicitly market opportunities with consumers that might e.g. subscribed to receiving transparency on the reliability and background of claims.
Transparency Challenge 9: Coordination and cooperation initiatives
Scope and state of the art
A prerequisite for making transparency work was the assurance that all enterprises along the chain adhere to the requirements of a suitable chain information process and were able to link up with their suppliers and customers for appropriate information exchange. Even if information processes had been clearly defined, enterprises still needed to be coordinated in their efforts and to have the technological, organizational, and intellectual capability as well as the legal and contractual right to collect, process, provide, and communicate the requested information.
Goal 1: Identifying suitable organizational infrastructures for coordination support towards increasing transparency in the sector
Major research challenges
Challenge 1: Identification of major barriers towards increased in transparency and identification of potential blueprints for possible organizational infrastructures in support of transparency. This might involve new private or public institutional initiatives or organizational developments within the sector.
Goal 2: Reaching a sector status in information availability and information handling that fits transparency needs and efficiency requirements
Major research challenges
- Challenge 1: Determining the indicators for a suitable analyswas of 'T-readiness'. Analyzing and mapping the actual level of 'E-readiness' and 'T-readiness' at enterprise and sector level in the sector. Identification of possible layers of feasible enterprise networks with fitting T-readiness.
- Challenge 2: Analysing needs for investments and initiatives on enterprise and sector level for moving upwards in layers, e.g. moving from a lower to a higher level of T-readiness. Analysing costs and benefits of selected (content specific) transparency systems of different layers and specification of the benefit-cost ratio of moving from lower to higher levels of T-readiness on enterprise and sector level.
Potential Impact:
The ultimate goal of the project was to contributing to the long-term sustainability and competitiveness of the food sector in serving consumers with food that meets their expectations now and in the future within the dynamically changing environmental, social and ethical framework set by society.
The project's immediate contribution to this goal was on supporting the elimination of sector deficiencies in providing transparency to consumers, policy and enterprises along the chain which would enable 'informed decisions' and an 'informed appreciation' of the sector's efforts towards sustainability at all levels. Deficiencies in transparency are considered one of the crucial barriers in sector developments towards sustainability which are not just of relevance for food but with the crucial relevance of food production for the society, of broad societal implications not just in Europe but on a global scale.
The lack of a European approach has been limiting the development of systems that could support transparency on a broad scale, e.g. involving the many small and medium sized enterprises active in the sector. There have been many past efforts to provide solutions for the 'transparency problem'. None of them proved to be successful beyond the immediate project environment, primarily due to remaining deficiencies in the system approach required for solving the transparency problem in the dynamically changing network situation of the food sector with its many SMEs.
The project aimed at providing transparency in deficiencies that required attention for making a sector wide transparency solution feasible. A small illustration of one of the domains under consideration should clarify the situation. There have been a number of projects dealing with the establishment of tracking and tracing systems in food. However, there is not yet any agreed communication standard that allows exchange of data between agriculture, industry and retail, a base requirement for any communication system. Similar deficiencies are in communication with consumers, in concepts for dealing with data ownership etc. etc.
Main dissemination activities and exploitation of results
For optimal dissemination and exploitation of the project's results to the stakeholders in the European food sector, the project organized a broad initiative for improvements in transparency, which has been reached through a broad awareness on opportunities, needs and the value of transparency for the sustainable development of the sector. The following initiatives have been created:
1. BEST PRACTICE INVENTORY ON FOOD TRANSPARENCY
The inventory contains descriptions of successful cases of food transparency systems. These cases can be used by the food businesses as a source of practical information to build up and improve their transparency systems. The inventory is freely available.
2. BEST PRACTICE GUIDE ON FOOD TRANSPARENCY
The objective of the guide is to provide practical advice to food businesses to build up and improve their transparency systems and to policy makers in designing policy measures to improve transparency for consumers. All potential users can have a free access to the guide. The owners can use it for contract work for food businesses and in other research projects. CCH and UBO use already this knowledge in the SmartAgriFood FP7 project.
3. TRAINING PACKAGE ON FOOD TRANSPARENCY
The objective of the training package is to provide the basis for systematic knowledge transfer on food transparency. The owner will provide training on fee paying basis. The project partners can have a free access right from the owner to deliver the course. Other interested organisations can have an access right to deliver the course by individual agreements. Expected impact includes improved knowledge on transparency practices and better legislation leading to better information of consumers enabling their informed decisions.
4. STRATEGIC RESEARCH AGENDA ON FOOD TRANSPARENCY
The purpose of the exploitable foreground is identifying the directions and topics of future research and to provide input for the EU and national research programmes.
5. EUROPEAN TRANSPARENCY PLATFORM
The purpose of the European Transparency Platform is to provide a tool for the dialogue with the stakeholders on food transparency. All stakeholders can use it for improving their knowledge and understanding on food transparency systems.
6. BLUEPRINT PROPOSAL FOR EUROPEAN BACKBONE SOLUTION
The purpose of the foreground is to provide a knowledge base for standardisation of the ICT infrastructure for food transparency systems. KTBL and UBO can use it for contract work and further research including the SmartAgriFood project.
List of Websites:
http://www.transparentfood.eu
prof. Dr. Gerhard Schiefer
university of Bonn
department of Food and Resource Economics
chair for Business Management, Organization and Information Management
meckenheimer Allee 174
D-53115 Bonn
germany
E-mail: schiefer@uni-bonn.de
phone: +49-228-733500
fax: +49-228-733431