Creating Smart and Attractive Tools to Enhance Healthy and Sustainable Food Provision, Eating and Treating of Food at Home

The topic is in line with the European Green Deal priorities and the farm to fork strategy for a fair, healthy and environmentally friendly food system, as well as of the EU's climate ambition for 2030 and 2050. This will contribute to the Food 2030 priorities: nutrition for sustainable healthy diets, climate, environment, circularity and resource efficiency, innovation and empowering communities. The EU’s farm to fork strategy states that: “European diets are not in line with national dietary recommendations, and the ‘food environment’^[1] does not ensure that the healthy option is always the easiest one”.

The overall aim of this topic and associated R&I activities is to enhance healthy and sustainable diets aligned with national dietary advice by empowerment of citizens and their capacity to eat and cook at home in line with budgetary and time constraints as well as their living situation. The activity will develop tools that can be considered by national competent authorities for implementation. Interventions should not target citizens directly, as full alignment with national policies and advice on nutrition and health needs to be ensured.

Projects results are expected to contribute to all the following expected outcomes:

• Empowered citizens supported by tools and applications to make healthy and sustainable food provision, cooking and eating, and treating of food at home the easiest choice;
• Enhanced uptake of beneficial tools and applications by citizens, especially those who need it most, considering socio-economic characteristics and differences across EU and Associated countries.

Urban lifestyles have led to more consumption of ultra-processed and packaged food^[2]. Cooking skills may enhance healthy and sustainable diets, so supporting consumers provides potential^[3]. There are also indications, that social change might be enhanced by encouraging minorities to publicly challenge unsustainable norms during social interactions^[4]. This potential can be exploited to drive change in behaviour by citizen engagement.

Proposals are expected to address the following:

• Develop tools and applications that enhance citizens to have a healthy and sustainable food provision, diet and treating of food at home/ or discourage unhealthy and unsustainable choices that can be considered by national policy makers and private actors;
• Include in approaches ‘culinary culture dimension’ such as based on nationality, religion, culture, regionality and seasonality etc., and time and financial constraints;
• Engage citizens in solutions to create inclusive and sustainable solutions for broad uptake;
• Ensure that national nutritional policies and advice are respected as well as food safety;
• Link solutions to the issue of food waste and to the need to reduce household wastes generally, notably plastics, as part of a circular economy to include all aspects of sustainability tools that can be considered by national policy makers for implementation;
• Take a holistic approach, e.g., delivery (including prepared meals, micro deliveries, decentralised pick-up points) including transport and distribution aspects, short supply chains, marketing, sustainable packaging, recycling and reduction in food waste;
• Develop a sample plan to make available to Member State and Associated Countries authorities for several countries on how to enhance uptake of beneficial tools and applications considering different socio-economic characteristics of citizens and national laws.

Proposals must implement the 'multi-actor approach' and ensure adequate involvement of among others health actors, such as nutritionists, doctors and nurses.

Proposals should include a dedicated task, appropriate resources and a plan on how they will collaborate with other projects funded under this topic and under the topic HORIZON-CL6-2021-FARM2FORK-01-15: “Transition to healthy and sustainable dietary behavior”.

Proposal should apply social innovation and citizen engagement for inclusive and long-term solutions beyond the life cycle of the project and include a strong involvement of citizens/civil society, together with academia/research, industry/SMEs/start-ups and government/public authorities.

This topic should involve the effective contribution of SSH disciplines.

Activities are expected to achieve TRL 6-8 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.

[1] European Public Health Alliance (2019) “Food environments are the physical, economic, political and socio-cultural contexts in which people engage with the food system to make their decisions about acquiring, preparing and consuming food.” 

https://epha.org/what-are-food-environments/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CFood%20environment%20refers%20to%20the,%2C%20preparing%20and%20consuming%20food.%E2%80%9D

[2] FAO. “Urban Food Action (UFA)”, 2019

[3] Hartmann, C., Dohle, S., Siegrist, M. Importance of cooking skills for balanced food choices, Appetite 65 (65), 125-131, 2013

[4] Bolderdijk, W.M., Jans,L. Minority influence in climate change mitigation, Current Opinion in Psychology 41, 25-30, 2021

 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.02.005