Empowering sustainable food choices – enabling environments and dietary shifts
FoodTriggers investigates societal tipping points for sustainable diets, which are healthy for both people and the planet. Societal tipping points are particular moments in transitions where small perturbations can trigger a cascade of effects that lead to a different state of the system.
FoodTriggers identifies key entry points, across Northern and Southern European contexts, where interventions carried out in personal, social and external food environments can trigger positive feedback loops accelerating shifts towards sustainable diets, and food systems.
Despite the geographical differences, both Mediterranean and Nordic diets are acknowledged as healthy and sustainable reference diets. FoodTriggers:
- compares enabling conditions and barriers for sustainable diets in these different contexts for various social groups and maps least conflictual areas for interventions;
- carries out Food Environment Labs with associated partners and collaborators in retail, restaurants and social media to investigate transformative ways of redesigning physical and digital food environments;
- co-creates a sustainability assessment tool to monitor progress in retail food environments and guidelines for social media marketing;
- evaluates the real time impact of reduction of Value Added Tax for healthy foods in Spain and stimulates the price reductions in the Nordic context to identify entry-points for price changes;
- compares policy mixes in the support of sustainable diets, carries out Citizen Juries for their deliberation and develops a transformative policy mix framework to support policy deliberation at a national and European level.
The unique comparative setting of FoodTriggers allows to co-produce novel understanding of societal tipping points as applied to dietary shifts. The transdisciplinary approach, combining co-creation with retailer companies, restaurants, industry associations, social media influencers, public officials and decision-makers delivers results that are applicable to practice from regional to national and EU-levels. The assessment tool for retail food environment, guidelines for social media marketing and the transformative policy mix framework are cocreated to be applicable across European contexts.
FoodTriggers consortium brings together a unique and competent team from the Northern and Southern Europe with associated partners from retail, restaurants, associations and public administration. The Food Environment Labs, FoodTriggers panels and Scientific and Stakeholder Advisory Board are established to ensure active interaction, scalable outcomes and societal impact.
