Less waste in the agri-food value chains and more environmental sustainability with Lowinfood. This is the name of the project funded with 6 millions euro by the European Commission, with Emilia-Romagna participating together with 26 European partners. The aim is to improve and scale up a variety of technology, social and management innovations for the reduction of food loss and waste from farm to fork, especially in the fish, fruit and vegetables and bakery sectors.

It is no small challenge: the annual food waste in the EU is estimated to sum up to the tremendous amount of 90 millions of tons per year, which represents about the 20% of the total produced food. A gamble, the reduction of losses along the value chains of food production and supply, which is one of the Sustainable Development Goals included in the UN 2030 Agenda. The EU is committed to meeting the target goals to halve per capita food waste at the retail and consumer level as well.

Lowinfood project has a multi-actor approach and integrates 27 partners from several disciplines for the study and implementation of solutions against food loss and waste: University of Tuscia, based in Viterbo, is the Coordinator, University of Bologna is a partner as well together with other scientific partners, start-ups providing the innovations and companies working in the food sector from 12 different countries.

Market withdrawals: Emilia-Romagna as a reference model

Emilia-Romagna Region was recognized as innovative example for the management of CAP Food Surplus withdrawals: fresh fruit and vegetables are donated to a network of authorized charity organizations. The innovation consists of a dedicated software calles Sir (Sistema informativo dei ritiri in Italian) that makes the market withdrawals easier with a constant monitoring of the amount of donated food.

A four year project

Thanks to the participation in Lowinfood,a four year project, Emilia-Romagna Region can gain credit at European level as region of excellence for managing the market withdrawals and redistribution of surplus food to the poor.The spread of this model could possibly lead to propose the institutionalization of the platform to the European Commission as a good practice to be adopted in other countries. The software platform maximizes efficiency and allowed from 2012 to 2020 withdraw from the market and donate to charity organizations based in Emilia-Romagna over 36 thousand tons of fresh fruit and vegetables out of 130 thousand tons at a national level.