The European Green Deal and its farm-to-fork (F2F) strategy have made sustainability in the food system an EU policy priority. It aims to help the EU's current food system transition towards a fairer, healthier and environmentally friendlier one while maintaining its economic viability. The F2F strategy signals action areas to the operators of the food chain, giving rise to opportunities and challenges. The adoption of sustainability-enhancing innovations plays an increasingly important role in this transition. It creates value for companies as they increase their competitive advantage, but also for society as a whole. However, there is limited information on operator-level sustainability initiatives across the food chain. To understand how regulations can effectively support the transition, it is important for policymakers to know which factors and barriers lie behind innovative sustainability initiatives, how they happen, and their expected implications and trade-offs across sustainability dimensions (economic, social/health and environmental) and stages of the food chain. For the purposes of this study, we have interviewed food operators, associations and related organisations to address this gap. Overall, 314 sustainability initiatives were identified, revealing that operators, to different extents, are introducing innovative sustainability initiatives to foster more sustainable food production and consumption processes. The identified initiatives emphasise, with some variation according to the stage of the food chain in question, the pivotal role of the economic dimension, followed by that of the environmental dimension, and the weaker coverage of the social/health dimension. The interviews also revealed that the market's supply and demand requirements are the main driving factors for adopting sustainable initiatives. Interviewees consistently indicated that the lack of recognition of the sustainability efforts by consumers prevents the adoption of sustainable initiatives. Additionally, public support, clarity and harmonisation in the regulatory framework, funding for improved sustainable solutions and government technical support (i.e. for micro-businesses such as farmers) appear to be also essential catalysts for the adoption of sustainability initiatives in the private sector. Finally, the results also highlight the importance of collaboration and knowledge exchange between operators in the food system and with third-party institutions for sustainability innovation to happen. Collaboration with external third parties and vertical collaboration are more common and more acceptable for operators, from a strategic choice point of view, compared to horizontal collaboration. Horizontal collaboration seems to be more relevant to certain stages of the food chain (e.g. the farming sector, where innovating on an individual basis is more challenging) and to the promotion of sustainability issues that are not directly related to the core business activities of the operators involved. The findings of this report are important to operators and policymakers concerned with innovation on sustainability in the food system.
