PLATEFORMS - Sustainable Food Platforms: Enabling sustainable food practices through socio-technical innovation

In recent years, we have seen an increase in the range of food provisioning platforms available to consumers. Each platform presents consumers with a unique choice architecture. These emerge from both e-commerce development and consumer-driven food provisioning. Little is known about the impact of these new platforms on food choices, or to what degree they represent new opportunities to promote sustainable food practices. PLATEFORMS aims to produce in-depth knowledge on how food practices are affected by socio-technical innovations in food provisioning platforms, and communicate success stories of sustainability to platform owners and policy makers. The project includes both business-driven platforms (e.g supermarkets, online stores) and consumer-driven platforms (e.g food cooperatives). Methodologically and theoretically, the project is positioned between individualistic and systemic approaches - wheras the first is focusing on changing individual consumer behavior, and the second is ignoring consumers in favor of other actors and more "macro" solutions. More specifically, this project takes a socio-technical practice approach, seeing consumption in all its phases of planning, provisioning, storing, cooking, eating, and disposing - driven by practices more than by individual choices. The project will promote sustainable food choices through involvement with platform owners, dissemination of academic results and communication of sustainable success stories across countries and platforms. The communication will target platforms owners, policy makers, and NGOs. By producing new in-depth knowledge about concrete strategies to enable sustainable food consumption through food provisioning platforms, the project will affect consumer practices and choices on a larger scale. Moreover, through intervention studies and collaboration with platform owners, it will be possible to quantify the effect of interventions.

Keywords: Sustainable food consumption, household food practices, provisioning platforms, socio-technical innovation

Type: Research

Coordinated by: Dr. Arne Dulsrud - Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences NORWAY

4 partners:

  • IRELAND: University College Cork     
  • SWEDEN: University of Gothenburg  
  • ITALY: University of Trento
  • GERMANY: Humbold-Universität zu Berlin

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More information:

As part of the awareness building activity, three press releases and one article were featured in a number of national newspapers to draw public attention to the work being undertaken in PLATEFORMS project and highlight the role of households in promoting sustainable food practices. 

  • Press release 1
    Title: New Year’s Resolutions for a Sustainable Home - Five Simple Steps
    Main content:  An article on five steps for a sustainable home, to help you do your bit for global sustainability with a mention of the Plateforms project.

  • Press release 2 
    Title: Families sought for UCC food study (Irish examiner) 
    Main content:  PLATEFROMS specific article seeking participants for WP2.

  • Press release 3
    Title: Ten steps to a sustainable Christmas
    Main content:  A short piece as Part of ’10 steps to a sustainable Christmas’.

  • Press Article 1: RTE (The national public service media for Ireland) Brainstorm article Title: A new World War: are we ready 

     

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