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Transparency solutions for transforming the food system (TITAN)

The overall aim of TITAN is to enhance food transparency in order to transform the food system into a demand-driven economy that provides consumers with healthy and sustainable food.

TITAN is a 4-year project, coordinated by the International Life Sciences Institute Europe (ILSI). A consortium of 28 partners from across the EU and UK, it brings together universities, research centres, technology providers and agri-food actors and businesses. It addresses many questions that have been raised by the drive for greater transparency in the food system. For instance:

  • how can transparency be best used to allow the consumer to make more informed food choices?
  • how can challenges to increase uptake of transparency solutions among food system actors be overcome?
  • how can the latest technological developments (e.g. Blockchain, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence) be used to enhance transparency?
  • how can such technology be made available and affordable to small businesses?
  • how can policy be developed to enhance the transparency of food supply chains?

It fosters and showcases best practice in food supply chain innovations and technologies, and informs policy within a demand-driven business environment. Its goal is to deliver transparency solutions in the areas of food safety and authenticity, traceability, health and sustainability, and improving information for consumers.

Cardiff University leads a Work Package on Enabling policy solutions for transparent food supply chains. This examines how transparent food supply chains may be enabled through policy solutions, while also considering how the emergence of new technologies might require new forms of policymaking.

A systems approach will be adopted, aiming to understand how the impact of policy tools and their implementation of transparency solutions may impact differently at different points in the food supply system. Most fundamentally, it examines how actors across the food system, and associated policy, may define and envision transparency differently.

Aims

The TITAN project aims to:

  • develop and demonstrate co-created food transparency solutions that improve the safety and authenticity of our food
  • provide a range of co-created demonstrated transparency initiatives and solutions that will facilitate consumers making improved food choices
  • provide food stakeholders with fit-for-purpose, state-of-the art solutions for increasing and monitoring transparency in the food system
  • ensure all solutions are co-created, demand-driven, and applicable to small and large business
  • inform the development of new policy that encourages and enables the implementation of transparency solutions throughout food supply chains
  • develop a fertile and vibrant network of transparency technology businesses that will form the basis of a European incubator of next generation food transparency solution providers for realising the EU Farm to Fork Strategy within the European Green Deal
  • engage, communicate and disseminate the innovative solutions to inform stakeholders and maximise upscaling, transferability, exploitation, and take-up

The project team

Principal investigator

Dr Christopher Bear

Reader in Human Geography, Deputy Head of School

Team

Support

This research was made possible through the support of the following organisations: