HELPFOOD 4.0: Sustainability and circularity in the food chain

HelpFood 4.0 aimed to test and demonstrate the importance of designing and supporting social infrastructures to make food circular sustainability more practicable by scaling up and replicating the socio-digital innovation experimented into other RIS countries (Italy, Spain and Portugal). The project explored the role of food as an element of reconnection between farmers, citizens and “eaters” (i.e. citizens more aware of sustainable food issue) through the promotion of Community-Supported Agriculture models as sustainable example of production, distribution, and consumption of food.

The shortening of the supply chain is a solution to improve the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the food supply chain. To promote these changes, it was necessary to work with a multiscale and multilevel approach. The project promoted the sustainability of high-quality food along the food value chain due to cooperation between research organizations and farmers. During the project, the empowerment of eaters was pursued by providing information on geographical traceability and nutritional information, with the development of an IT tool allowing eaters to directly visualize the origin of ingredients to be implemented in food labelling.

The project started from the empirical research developed during the pilot project HelpFood in 2021 and worked on the scaling up and replication of the socio-technical innovation experimented in other RIS countries.