DRG4FOOD - Empowering a fair and responsible European FoodRegister, fostering citizen sovereignty and creating a data-driven food system
In a world where market abuses and social injustices pose a significant threat to consumer rights, both in the physical and virtual worlds, initiatives that establish trust in a data-driven food system have become increasingly critical. The EU-funded DRG4FOOD project aims to create a data-driven food system that inspires trust throughout the food chain. During the last three years, DRG4FOOD tested use cases (i.e., concrete scenarios on how data might be used) in the areas of personalised nutrition and food traceability.
DRG4FOOD launched two open calls for funding in September 2023 and Spring 2024 for a total of €1.9 million. The funding was available to research groups, start-ups, SMEs and innovators who were interested in implementing dedicated tools and applications regarding the DRGs while receiving training and support to scale them up.
DRG4FOOD comes with five clear objectives and is set to generate a row of important outcomes and impacts:
- Developing a new paradigm for successful data-driven food applications – principle-based around openness, user-centricity, sovereignty and trust
- Developing a roadmap to a new data-driven food system around openness, sovereignty, fairness and trust
- Developing human-centric, decentralised and trustworthy electronic food system technology, enablers made up of baseline technologies
- <Demonstrating new services and applications within a virtual food system
- Selecting and engaging at least 10 third-party pilots through two DRG4Food Open Call
DRG4FOOD works closely with FOODITY, another project that is running in parallel, to launch open calls for funding, other possible data applications in the food sector and maximise the project’s impact. Collaboratively, they will also hold the final conference at the end of October 2025.
Within DRG4FOOD, EUFIC is maximising the impact of the project’s results through the effective implementation of dissemination, exploitation, communication and networking activities addressing the needs and knowledge gaps of the identified target groups, and cooperation with European Commission services, initiatives and closely related projects.
Since the launch of the project in December 2022, and as the leading partner for the communication and dissemination activities, EUFIC has:
- Developed a brand identity, project templates and communication material (e.g., first press release, virtual backgrounds for online workshops and events, social media posts) to be used for communicating about the project and related activities to different audiences.
- Designed the Food Data comic book, a visual source with relatable characters facing real-life food shopping dilemmas aiming to simplify complex topics.
- Regular updated newsletters presenting the news, event and outputs of the project.
- Broadcasted more than 11episode of the DRG4FOOD branded “Digital Food Podcast” exploring with experts how digital technologies are revolutionizing the food industry.
- Collected practice abstracts and translated in 6 european languages that presents project outputs and insights from the activities funded under the open calls.
- Held a series of webinars and uploaded on YouTube @scifoohealth channel.
Also, EUFIC is planning to:
- Facilitate 3 online workshops in April and May 2025 gathering feedback for the Roadmap created during the project.
- Organize the final conference next 22nd and 23rd of October in collaboration with FOODITY, registration are open here: A Recipe for Trust: Food, Data and Our Choices Tickets, Multiple Dates | Eventbrite
- Giacomo Sini, Collaborative Projects – Manager
- Matteo Sabini, Collaborative Projects – Area lead
- Florentin Ndizeye, Collaborative Projects – Junior Manager
- Twitter: #DRG4FOOD / @SciFoodHealth
- LinkedIn: #DRG4FOOD / @SciFoodHealth
- Sustainable Food Systems Network
- Project website: https://drg4food.eu/