April 30, 2024

COLLABORATION OPPORTUNITY: YOUR INPUT ON PRIVATE FOOD MARKETING STANDARDS!

The recently started EU funded research and innovation project BREADCRUMB , aims to better understand the inter-relationship between private and public food marketing standards in the EU, and if these standards do or do not affect food waste generation.  Food marketing standards are obligatory rules aimed at meeting consumers expectations and improving the economic conditions in food production and marketing, while ensuring the quality of food products.

The project’s goal is to strike a balance between food waste prevention and the other standards-related objectives, while improving the commercial viability and consumer acceptance of visually imperfect food products.

To this end, the project includes 16 case studies to obtain empirical, primary data on food waste across 7 EU member states on 5 different food commodity categories: fruit and vegetables, meat, eggs, cereals and fish. The underlying mechanisms through which standards lead to food waste generation will be modelled by IT tools with the aim to prevent food waste.

As one of the first steps, BREADCRUMB is identifying both public and private food marketing standards across the EU. By nature, information on private standards is extremely difficult to find in the public domain.

Therefore, BREADCRUMB asks for your support to help us better identify those standards, and to understand how they may or may not related to food waste generation. From April to June 2024 we are looking for input from actors across the food supply chain (particularly primary producers, processing & manufacturing, wholesalers, retailers, and the food services sectors) on private food marketing standards – research, creation, and implementation of these standards.

Contact: Should you have information that you are able to share on private marketing standards – and their impact on food waste generation –  or for any questions about the project, please contact: Chantal den Broeder of the BREADCRUMB project at (chantal.denbroeder@vltn.be) (from now until June 30, 2024).