Over 30% of EU citizens at vulnerable stages and situations in life are at increased risk to transgress from healthy weight to overweight and further to obesity. Though many interventions to tackle obesity have been proposed, they have rarely been effective. The aim of HealthyW8 is to advance the efficacy of current and future efforts and investments in obesity prevention initiatives across Europe. Most interventions suffer from not adapting to personal context (e.g. socioeconomic aspects, host-biological factors, environment, dietary preferences, fitness level etc.), focus only on diet or physical activity alone, do especially overlook emotional aspects, and fail to engage and motivate the user. Thus, initiatives on obesity prevention in policy and practice are often of marginal impact. HealthyW8 will address these shortcomings by iteratively developing, together with stakeholders, a digital-based healthy lifestyle recommender for evidence-based, tailored interventions and tools including a human digital twin to bridge the gap between science, societal actors and stakeholders (e.g. healthcare professionals, food industries, policymakers) and EU citizens. The targeted populations are those undergoing transitions, i.e. schoolchildren (5-10 y, and their parents), young adults (18-25 y) and the elderly (>65 y). In the mid-term, we estimate that with 200,000 HealthyW8 users, we will prevent 10,000 obesity cases/y. In the long run, the impact will be maximized through adopting the project’s proposed methodology, platform and tools by as many EU institutions and entities as possible. HealthyW8 is a highly experienced, synergistic and complementary consortium that will built on a previously developed digital dietary app (LIFANA) and draw on transdisciplinary research in pan-EU multicentre pilots and long-term randomized control trials to achieve its overarching objective of increasing impact of current and future obesity prevention interventions and policies in the EU.

Understanding the impacts of food marketing standards is quite complex as, they cover various sectors, are regulated at different levels, and have potential side-effects. Their interaction with Food Waste (FW) remains unclear, with the existing evidence being limited and contradictory. Furthermore, as marketing standards are introduced to meet wider objectives, trade-offs between such objectives and FW prevention, need to be assessed. This assessment should guide a re-balancing of marketing standards, to effectively meet contradicting goals. At the same time, FW, once accounted as a liability, is increasingly considered a potential source of business value, with suboptimal – but still safe to eat – foods, being a case still unexplored. What is needed therefore, is a dual approach, that first prevents FW generation by ‘re-balancing’ food marketing standards, and then improves market access to suboptimal foods to prevent them from becoming FW. Drawing from all above, BREADCRUMB will (1) create an inventory of private and interrelated public food marketing standards, and will provide an understanding of their purpose and nature, (2) will create an empirical evidence base to generate estimates of FW related to marketing standards in five food commodities (fruit & vegetables, meat, eggs, cereals, fish), (3) will model the underlying mechanisms through which, marketing standards lead to FW generation, and the trade-offs between the objective of preventing FW reduction and other objectives pursued by marketing standards, and will use the results to propose a re-balancing of existing standards, (4) will improve market access to suboptimal foods by guiding food businesses to select appropriate marketing channels and to quantify their business value, and by fostering change in consumers’ acceptance of suboptimal foods, and (5) will structure the previous results into operational and policy guidance on how to prevent/reduce FW related to marketing standards.

Circular Agronomics (CA) provides a comprehensive synthesis of practical solutions to improve the current Carbon (C), Nitrogen (N) and Phosphorus (P) cycling in European agro-ecosystems and related up- and down-stream processes within the value-chain of food production. The proposed solutions would constitute a further step towards making agriculture an integral part of a circular economy by increasing resource efficiency while simultaneously addressing associated environmental challenges such as greenhouse gas and ammonia emissions as well as eutrophication of water bodies. Along 7 work packages and 6 case-studies, representing locations with different biogeographic conditions and environmental challenges typical for the European agricultural sector, the objective of CA is to contribute to a development towards sustainable, resilient and inclusive economies that are part of circular and zero-waste societies. The involved multi-actor and international consortium aims (i) To increase the understanding of C, N, P flows and the related potential to reduce environmental impacts at farm and regional level under different bio-geographical conditions; (ii) To close loops within cropland farming, from livestock to cropland farming and to increase the reuse of waste/wastewater from food-industry to improve soil fertility and to increase nutrient use efficiency; (iii) To highlight the performance of different prototypes of agro-ecological systems and increase sustainability of food production in the EU; and (iv) To contribute to the improvement of the European Agricultural Policies by providing evidence based, farmer led and consumer relevant recommendations for the agri-food chain. Cross-cutting social, economic and environmental evaluation ensure the overall sustainability of the investigated solution.

Research and development activities are proposed for the benefit of sustainable pork chains based on European local pig breeds and their production systems. Workprogramme is planned to respond to consumer demands for quality and healthiness of pork products with regional identity and societal demands for environment preservation and development of local agro-economy. Description and evaluation of local pig breeds, with an emphasis on untapped ones will be performed using novel genomic tools. Performance of local pig breeds will be evaluated in contrasted agro-geo-climatic conditions and production systems (indoor, outdoor, organic). Focus will be on pig feeding and management strategies and on the use of locally available feeding resources. Intrinsic quality of traditional and new regional high quality pork products and attitudes of consumers from various market areas will be assessed; in particular the motives for the choice and willingness to pay such products. Marketing strategies will be adressed in particular short chain distribution channels. All activities will be driven from the perspective of sustainability (environmental impact, animal welfare, product quality, consumer acceptability and market potential). The activities will engage innovative approaches to answer socio-economic demands of regional pork chains involving partners from different sectors. The ambition is to enhance existing and create new networks between academia and non-academia partners, within and between regions and to tackle the value chain for regional high quality pork products, focusing on diverse and so far untapped pig breeds, their production systems and pork products. Cross-fertilising interactions between research, local agriculture, businesses and end-users will be achieved with partners from these complementary sectors in all research and development activities.