SMARTCHAIN is an ambitious, three-year project with 43 partners from 11 European countries. The project’s key objective is to enable and drive forward a shift toward collaborative, short food chains and to use concrete activities and policy recommendations to start measures that could improve the European agri-food sector’s competitiveness and sustainability. The project will establish nine national “Innovation and Collaboration hubs” on the topic of short food chains in France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Serbia, Spain, and Switzerland as well as a virtual innovation hub. These will aim to promote stakeholder participation by bringing together farmers and consumers in a confidence-building environment. Together, they are to develop needs-oriented innovations. The combination of scientific and practical knowledge and the use of innovative workshops are to enable the development of practical, innovative solutions as well as a framework program for various forms of collaborative food chains in urban and rural areas. By organizing and carrying out multi-stakeholder workshops and training sessions for farmers and entrepreneurs in the area of short food chains, SMARTCHAIN will create concrete tools for knowledge transfer.
Participating institutions at the University of Hohenheim are:
