The general aim of FUSILLI is to support the participant pan-European cities (and their peri-urban areas) with the aim to address by a strong cooperation for knowledge sharing and mutual learning the challenges of the food system transformation. The main objective is to build an urban food plan to reach an integrated and safe holistic transition towards healthy, sustainable secure, inclusive, equitable and cost-efficient food systems, through feasible and replicable innovative urban policies leading to deploy improving actions in all stages of the food value chain in line with the four FOOD 2030 policy priorities (Nutrition for sustainable and healthy diets; Climate-smart and environmentally sustainable food systems; Circularity and resource efficient food systems; and Innovation and empowerment of communities). Each city will create or improve the development of a living lab, which is an open innovation ecosystem where concrete actions will be deployed to develop and implement urban food systems policies delivering on the four FOOD 2030 priorities. These living labs have an objective to solve with the implementation of different innovative actions through all the stages of the food chain: production and processing, distribution and logistics, consumption, food loss and waste, and governance. Living lab will involve several stakeholders representing all the actors in the food system at local level: it will have at least a public authority, industry partner (SME or association), consumer association and education. A Knowledge Community will compile the current local initiatives to develop a catalogue of best practises to implement and exchange within the network of the participant living labs as well as other global initiatives.

MOEBIOS is an application of the circular (bio)economy concept: the development of three value chains incorporating separate recycling streams for bioplastics (BP’s) to improve waste management efficiency throughout Europe. It is a systemic innovation: it will create linkages addressed at the different key stages of the whole chains to solve a hierarchical challenge, from the collection of the bioplastic waste (simulated streams), up to the upcycling and validation of the final recycled end-products (holistic and coordinated solution). The new value chain will imply sorting, conditioning and valorising three types of waste streams from the packaging, agriculture and textile industries into three end-products, targeting to reach at least the same quality and functionality than the original grades, while the end users’ acceptance will be assessed as well. As cornerstone targets for maximizing project’s impact, the upscaling of the recycling processes will: (1) be integrated in pilot plants on the premises of actual industrial recycling lines currently operating in waste management companies, not disrupting them, and reaching a final TRL = 6/7 or even beyond. (2) focus on bioplastics for which recycling processes are still not in place, excluding bio-based analogues (“drop-ins”): PLA and PLA blends, PHA and its blends, PBS and PEF, accordingly with the market. The use of PBAT will be assessed as well. A Multi-Actor Approach (MAA) and a transdisciplinary methodology will engage waste producers, waste managers, bio-based and (bio)plastics industry, public authorities, standardization agencies, citizens and media multipliers, creating a co-creation and co-ownership innovation environment of + 50 participants.

Only in the EU, we generate every year around 89M tonnes of Food Loss and Waste (FLW), accounting for 20% of the total food produced, with costs estimated at ?143 Bn, impacting each stage of the Food Value Chain. In SISTERS, we propose a set of systemic innovations addressed to reduce FLW generated in every stage of the Food Value Chain in Europe that will solve main existing challenges in Production, Processing, Marketing (retailing/wholesaling), Consumption, and the Logistics among stages. SISTERS will design the 1st European Short Chain Platform for farmers to sell their discarded production, favouring local economies, providing access to nutritious and healthy food to the less favoured consumers. Smart and reusable food containers will be designed to diminish food losses during transportation, maintain bulk and packed food in ideal conditions with new accurate sensors allowing immediate reaction. Moreover, to improve the preservation and quality of food a set of bio-based and home-compostable packaging solutions will be created reducing their potential negative impacts in the environment. A novel SISTERS Seal of Excellence will promote sustainable practices among retailers. While the information provided to the consumers with QR and dynamic labelling incorporated in the packaging is expected to impact on retailers and consumers sustainable awareness, thus reducing the discard of food and associated FW. With these cross-sectorial innovations, we will achieve an ambitious environmental & economic impact of the current dynamics in the food system, contributing to the reduction of FLW and to change the unsustainable consumer behaviours. With the support of the EC, SISTERS will be a key EU project addressing the problem in a holistic way, reducing FLW by 27.4% and CO2 emissions by around 20% in the case studies. Our interdisciplinary SISTERS consortium consists of 18 partners from 8 European countries, with wide expertise in fighting FLW from Farm

ZeroW has set the ambitious target of playing a key role in the transition of current food systems towards halving Food Loss & Waste (FLW) by 2030 and reaching near-zero FLW by 2050. ZeroW provides significant impacts through the demonstration of innovations in nine real-life food chains, by employing a systemic innovation approach, to effectively address the multidimensional issue of FLW. This involves: (i) pre-identifying systemic innovations, that incorporate multiple interlinked dimensions (process, organisational, strategy, marketing, product, technological, governance, etc.), which are tested and demonstrated; (ii) steering the evolution of innovations towards higher levels of systemic readiness and impact, using a Living Lab co-creation and multi-actor collective learning approach; (iii) enhancing the Living Lab actors’ innovation advancement capability with shared resources facilitating new ways and means of cooperating and co-developing innovations; (iv) developing context-specific trajectories for the systemic innovations (from ideation to scaling-up and commercialisation) leading to the provision of currently missing end products and services that align with consumer attitudes, food actor needs and policy trends. Moreover, ZeroW establishes a clear ‘FLW impact trajectory’, from demonstrator results (2025), scaled up to meet the F2F 2030 goals, and steered through a ‘just transition pathway’ towards a near-zero FLW in 2050.

Food waste is a major problem: around 88 million tonnes of food is wasted annually along the EU supply chain, from primary production to consumption, with associated costs of 143 billion. The associated environmental impact is also huge: global food loss and waste is equivalent to 8-10% of total anthropogenic GHG emissions and costs around $1 trillion per year, and 30% of agricultural land is wasted. The situation may be even worse, as statistics indicate that 70% of all food lost or wasted by humans may be unrecorded because it originates from primary production or is used as animal feed. In parallel, the assessment of this problem remains unresolved, not only because it is extremely complex due to the lack of open access data and the absence of a standard methodology for comprehensive assessment in real food systems, but also because it affects the commitment of private entities that need to assess the cost-effectiveness and sustainability of food waste prevention and reduction (FWPR) solutions in order to act. ToNoWaste is a 48-month project in which 21 institutions from 7 countries collaborate to overcome this challenge with a multi-stakeholder and interdisciplinary approach that considers not only agronomic, economic, environmental and business model challenges, but also other cross-cutting aspects such as psychology, law and social innovation to fight also against gender and social inequalities. ToNoWaste will inspire market actors to use science and evidence-based assessment tools and data to make better decisions towards more sustainable food production and consumption patterns. It starts from research on what makes the best decision regarding FWPR actions in the fresh food value chain. It is an open innovation ecosystem designed to leverage previous findings for the identification of social, technical/environmental, economic, political/legal, ethical and demographic drivers and to collaborate with ongoing R&D actions to propose comprehensive FWPR solutions