Diversity of European cities and regions creates barriers to the demonstration of systemic food-related innovative approaches valuable in so different contexts. Objective of FoodE is to accelerate the growth of citizen-led City/Region food systems (CRFS) by bringing local initiatives across Europe together, as well as co-developing and disseminating a range of tools - co-designed with academia, citizens, and food system start-ups - to ensure that the most up-to-date cross-sectorial knowledge is applied. Start-ups will also provide an in-depth understanding of the needs of the key stakeholders, making resilient citizen-driven food systems happen. The key challenge is then to aggregate the most sustainable models of CRFS and enable co-creation of innovative pilot experiences, fostering the health and wellbeing of European citizens. This challenge will be tackled by setting a co-created mechanism, based on Citizen Science and Responsible Research and Innovation principles, where public authorities, citizens, business actors and non-profit organisations share ideas, tools, best practices and new models, supporting cities in becoming innovative food hubs. The outputs of FoodE will impact on job creation, promotion of local economy, strengthening the role of local communities in complying with Sustainable Development Goals, as well as identifying and strengthening relations between the different actors of the food chain. The way used by FoodE to achieve this goals consists of the following steps: - Define an operational methodology for the assessment of CRFS. - Promote cross-pollination between European CRFS. - Contribute to increase access to affordable, safe and nutritious food. - Create a tool mobilising CRFS stakeholders in sustainability assessment. - Upscale the output to other EU cities.

CIRCLES aims to discover and translate innovative microbiomes-tailored circular actions into concrete applications that will ultimately enhance EU food system performances and their overall sustainability. The setup of real-world labs in the field of 6 food systems relevant to the EU market – tomatoes, spinach, poultry, pigs, Atlantic salmon and seabream aquacultures – will, first, enable CIRCLES to increase knowledge on the importance of food system microbiomes as determinants of productivity, quality, safety and sustainability. This discovery phase will nurture the design and implementation of food system-specific microbiomes-tailored circular actions. Relying on an integrative usage of different Smart Microbiome (SM)-modulators, circular actions aim to optimize the microbiomes of food systems, from farm to fork, for an overall improvement of food system performances. The effectiveness of actions will then be tested in the labs in the field. This real-world validation phase will allow CIRCLES to translate the project results into concrete products, applications, procedures and tools, ready to be exploited and communicated to penetrate the EU market. In particular, CIRCLES will conceptualize and create SM-food systems for the 6 CIRCLES food chains, defined as food systems with optimized microbiome configurations. CIRCLES will also provide innovative, newly defined SM-food products, as foods derived from the SM-food systems and certified by Microbiome Transparent (MT)-labels. Finally, a vast panel of food system-specific SM-modulators will be provided as new agro-biotech applications to be integrated into circular actions to reach the status of SM-food system. In conclusion, the conceptualization, creation, and dissemination of SM-food systems, as well as all connected procedures, products, and tools, will allow CIRCLES to endow the EU food systems with new, cost-effective commercial applications for improved productivity, quality, safety and sustainability.