10-11-2014 | On 30 and 31 October FUSIONS organized an interactive meeting on how to create impact to prevent food waste. Over 130 people from various stakeholder groups in the Food Supply Chain gathered to discuss on the outcomes and findings of the FUSIONS project. The two days were filled with many opportunities for inspiration, discussion, networking and interaction on food waste prevention.

Three key topics were at the heart of this 2nd European Platform Meeting:

  •  Measuring for impact
  • Innovation for food waste prevention
  • Policy measures for social innovation

Food waste prevention
On the first day of the platform meeting, participants were inspired by keynotes from FUSIONS’ Coordinator Toine Timmermans (Wageningen UR, NL) on the projects progress in the past year, DG Sanco’s Chantal Bruetschy and WRI’s Kai Robertson, who informed on the latest developments in food waste policy and global food loss and waste measurements and WRAP’s Sophie Easteal on the role of social innovation in preventing food waste. The next day, Karin Östergren from SIK presented a keynote on reliable data for quantifying food waste in EU-28 and Matteo Vittuari from the University of Bologna’s focused on European policy measures for through social innovation.
Throughout the two days, participants were consulted on key issues which are at the core of FUSIONS deliverables and had the opportunity to listen to inspiration pitches including

  • Michael Minch Dixon from Snact, UK
  • Joris Depouillon, food waste entrepreneur
  •  Odile Le Boloch from the Irish Environmental Protection Agency
  • Alfred Vara Blanco from ARC Waste Agency of Catalonia, Spain
  • Ann Marie Manhart from Envicient, Austria
  • Clementine O’Connor from BIO for Deloitte and associate to the UN Environmental Programme
    and others

The presentations of the meeting can be found on the website of FUSIONS.

Fusions
The FUSIONS (Food Use for Social Innovation by Optimising waste prevention Strategies) project was set up with the specific aim of helping to build a Europe that handles its resources efficiently by realising dramatic reductions in food waste. The four-year project runs from August 2012 to July 2016 and is funded by the European FP7 programme. Wageningen UR Food & Biobased Research is coordinating the project.

Source: Wageningen UR