GourMed - GOvernance of food supply chain to eqUilibrate pRice and profits of high quality and safe MEDiterranean foods

The Mediterranean Agri-food value chain represents a complex ecosystem with numerous local actors, including farmers, small-scale food manufacturers and local distributors, canteens and retailers local public authorities. However, its competitiveness is seriously challenged by increasing imported agriculture resources and food products, as processed food, or as ingredients of food productions. Those products are produced in large volumes for global markets, at low prices, and in regions suffering less from climate and environmental constraints, compared to the Mediterranean area. In addition,the price small farmers get for their products is quite low, compared to the price that products are sold to the end customer. This is due to the presence of many powerful actors, other than smallholders, in the farm-to-fork supply chain who can position and negotiate powerfully. Hence, there is a need for innovative organisational approaches and tools (tools and machines, business models, green public procurement, software, applications, etc.) that can help overcoming this challenge. New optimization models for the local Agri-food supply chain are requested, which provide local and distinguished benefit, economically, environmentally and socially to smallholders.

Τhe project’s successful completion will be facilitated by: (i) a number of real-life small-actor food value chains across the Mediterranean, to serve as case studies throughout the project; (ii) the development of project solutions taking into account not only the needs but, equally important, the capabilities of small food actors to adopt them; (iii) the adoption of a Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) approach coupled with open innovation, to align project progress and outcomes with societal values, needs & expectations.

In order to achieve its goal, the project will follow a path that includes (1) understanding value creation & fair value distribution, through the definition of fair product's attributes from a consumer and producer perspective and the analysis and qualitative assessment of fair business models and technologies on product characteristics and and price functions, (2) optimizing Business Model and Technology Tool Adoption Decisions, within the use of quantification methods for the technology correlations with the product fairness attributes, (3) demonstrating and assessing the impacts on real pilots around the Mediterranean area and (4) building the capacity of MED agri-food chains and exploit the project's results, through the development of a guidebook for sustainable and resilient agri-food VC development and the Capacity Building courses for fair BM and innovative technology integration to agri-food VCs.