Reducing food waste due to marketing standards through alternative market access

It appears that a substantial amount of food waste may be due to marketing standards, yet there is very limited concrete evidence on how much, why and how to address it.

There is a need to deepen our understanding and identify solutions to prevent and reduce food waste along with any trade-offs, by improving the business potential of suboptimal foods.

ROSETTA sets out to deliver reliable evidence, produced through transdisciplinary research with the engagement of use case multi-actors, that a) estimates food waste generated by the use of marketing standards along the whole value chain, b) co-defines and validates sustainable solutions for the valorisation of that waste, and c) assesses trade-offs.

The current framework of marketing standards of food commodities at international, EU, national and private level, will be analysed, and the reasons for their establishment will be assessed.

An operational plan will be developed to deploy pilot experiments in five (5) use cases across EU countries, led by private marketing standards owners or networks/clusters in the value chain, representing four (4) main food commodities, namely fruit & vegetables, cereals, dairy and meat.

A comparative analysis of data collected from both lab and field research, combined with LCSA study, will validate and optimise use-case selected solutions, which are expected to reduce food waste due to marketing standards by 60% – 80% through alternative market access for suboptimal foods, including processing and other strategies as well as changes in social practices.

The validated and optimised solutions will provide insights for knowledge transfer and identify opportunities for social learning.

Insights will be used to develop replication guidelines and policy recommendations, addressed to food businesses, marketing standards owners, policy makers and regulators, to help revise or design marketing standards and support future policy development, in order to prevent and reduce food waste.