Examines food consumption trends in the European Union and assesses their implications for promoting healthy and environmentally sustainable diets.
Food System publications
Featured publications
The following publications provide an overview of the EU Food System Monitoring Framework and recent evidence on food consumption trends, supporting the transition towards healthier and more sustainable food systems.
Introduces the EU Food System Monitoring Framework, presenting its conceptual approach and the set of indicators developed to assess food system sustainability.
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Examines food consumption trends in the European Union and assesses their implications for promoting healthy and environmentally sustainable diets.
Expands the EU Food System Monitoring Framework by introducing fifteen additional indicators to improve the balance and comprehensiveness of sustainability monitoring.
Describes the development of a comprehensive monitoring framework for assessing progress towards sustainable food systems across the European Union.
Analyses EU policy measures introducing environmental sustainability requirements across the food system and identifies opportunities to support the transition towards more sustainable food systems.
Interactive dashboard providing indicators and visualisations to monitor the environmental, social and economic performance of the EU food system.
Introduces the EU Food System Monitoring Framework, presenting its conceptual approach and the set of indicators developed to assess food system sustainability.
Unveiling the potential for an efficient use of nitrogen along the food supply and consumption chain
Ensuring global food security is one of the challenges of our society. Nitrogen availability has is key for food production, while contributing to different environmental impacts. This paper aims firstly to assess nitrogen flows and highlight hotspots of inefficient use of nitrogen along the European food chain.
As a result of the growing awareness of the need to prevent food waste, several initiatives have been launched in the last few years to reduce food waste generated across the food supply chain. However, the evaluation of food waste prevention interventions is still at an early stage of development and appropriate methods to assess their effectiveness are missing, hampering the identification of best practices amongst existing initiatives and the prioritisation of those that are most promising.
The need to increase circularity of industrial systems to address limited resources availability and climate change has triggered the development of the food waste biorefinery concept.
The need to increase circularity of industrial systems to address limited resources availability and climate change has triggered the development of the food waste biorefinery concept.
Member States are now obliged to monitor the generation of food waste along the food supply chain and to take measures to limit it.
Bioeconomy Knowledge Centre European Platform Life Cycle Assessment (EPLCA) 117458_178010 The economic, environmental, and social impacts of food waste are significant and its reduction is urgent. Target 12.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals advocates for a 50% reduction of the per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer level by 2030, and for a reduction in food losses along production and supply chains including post-harvest losses.
Food waste is considered a sustainability challenge, and its reduction is advocated by the Sustainable Development Goal 12.3.
In 2015, the United Nations defined the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which include a target (12.3) on food waste. The target requires “by 2030, to halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and to reduce food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses”
About one third of the food produced globally is wasted along the food chain, representing a burden for the environment and an inefficiency of the food system. Tackling food waste is a priority on the global political agenda to guarantee food security. The definition of a methodology for food waste quantification is key to monitoring progress towards the achievement of reduction targets.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN), “Food loss and food waste refer to the decrease of food in subsequent stages of the food supply chain (FSC) intended for human consumption.
An increasing global population, an evolution in consumers’ needs, changes in consumption models, and a considerable generation of food waste pose serious challenges to the overall sustainability of food production and consumption.
Food waste represents a potential source to produce value-added materials replacing the use of virgin ones.
According to national studies conducted in EU countries, fresh fruit and vegetables contribute to almost 50% of the food waste generated by households. This study presents an estimation of this waste flow, differentiating between unavoidable and avoidable waste. The calculation of these two flows serves different purposes.
Contributing to environmental pollution and resources depletion, food waste represents a considerable inefficiency of the global food system. Within the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 12.3, countries committed to halve per-capita food waste generated at retail and consumer levels and to decrease food waste along the food supply chain by 2030.
Food waste has gained prominence in the political debate thanks to the recent Circular Economy package. Up to now the waste hierarchy, introduced by the Waste Framework Directive, has been the rule followed to prioritize food waste prevention and management measures according to the environmental criteria.
The EU Consumer Footprint aims at assessing the potential environmental impacts due to consumption. The calculation of the Consumer footprint is based on the life cycle assessment (LCA) of representative products (or services) purchased and used in one year by an EU citizen. This report is about the subset indicator of the basket of product (BoP) on food. The BoP food is built to assess the impact associated to food consumption in Europe from raw material extraction to end of life.
The production of food waste covers all the food life cycle: from agriculture, up to industrial manufacturing and processing, retail and household consumption. In developed countries, 42% of food waste is produced by households, while 39% losses occur in the food manufacturing industry, 14% in food service sector and remaining 5% in retail and distribution. Increasingly, industrial ecology concepts such as cradle to cradle and circular economy are considered leading principle for eco-innovation, aiming at “zero waste economy” in which waste are used as raw material for new products and applications.
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| Originally Published | Last Updated | 22 May 2026 | 24 Jul 2026 |
| Knowledge service | Metadata | European Platform Life Cycle Assessment (EPLCA) |
