PROSJEKT

Prosjektleder

Ellen-Marie Forsberg

Varighet

01/10/2019 -

30/09/2022

Finansiør

Norges Forskningsråd, SAMANSVAR

BREAD – Building REsponsibility And Developing Innovative Strategies For Tackling Food Waste

Avoiding food waste - which is an economic, social, political and most importantly moral problem - is at the heart of food sector’s societal responsibility. While the goal of reducing and avoiding the wasting of food is broadly accepted, the questions how best to do it, with what tools, at what costs, and who is responsible for conducting and overseeing responsible innovation in the food sector - require reflection. This project seeks to gather the necessary knowledge about effective and efficient solutions that the Norwegian food sector can implement, adopting a broad governance perspective to the grand societal challenge of food waste. For this, we propose to work across scales and look at responsible innovation (RRI) on the level of policies (providing the context in which RRI occurs), at the level of companies, and finally, at the business/consumer interface.

The BREAD project is interested in diagnosing the obstacles for responsible innovation in the food sector and identifying innovation potential that can be unlocked. Our study will be conducted at 3 levels: of policies, firms and on the meeting point of individual consumers and food industry actors. This is reflected in the organization of the project, with 3 Work Packages covering these levels and the fourth aimed at a learning process at Integration. They ask 4 questions:

  1. How can European regulatory experiences enhance responsible innovation in Norway’s food sector?
  2. How can best CSR practices & RRI experiences be scaled-up?
  3. How can consumer perceptions of (co)responsibility in the food sector inform companies responsible innovation?
  4. How to integrate all RRI dimensions to unlock multidirectional learning and food waste reduction innovation?

The project is led by Center for Technology, Innovation and Culture at the University of Oslo, and Matvett and the REMARC center at the University of Pisa are collaborators, together with NORSUS. More information about the project can be found here (in Norwegian).

Information about the outcomes of the project’s first workshop with companies that have signed the industry agreement on food waste reduction in October 2020 can be found here (only in Norwegian).