BREADCRUMB · BRinging Evidence-bAseD food Chain solutions to prevent and RedUce food waste related to Marketing standards, and deliver climate and circularity co-Benefits

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.