Collaborative Agri-food Chains: Driving Innovation in Territorial Food Systems and Improving Outcomes for Producers and Consumers
COACH is a 3-year EU funded project focusing on collaborative agri-food initiatives anchored in territorial food systems.
The project aims to facilitate collaboration between farmers, consumers, local governments and other actors to scale up short agri-food chains which rebalance farmers’ position, create win-wins for producers and consumers and drive innovation in territorial food systems. The project began on 1st November 2020.
33 good practice case studies ‘Beacons’ will take part in the project and share their knowledge in a Living Library
The project consortium includes 8 partner organisations and 12 affiliated ‘linked’ third party organisations
The Communication, Learning and Innovation Platform (CLIP) is our online, dynamic interactive learning platform
Why COACH?
Farmers and small operators are often in a weak position in the value chain. They lack bargaining power, face barriers to accessing markets, and struggle to achieve a fair income.
At the same time, due to growing public awareness of the environmental crisis, and the rise of diet-related ill-health, many consumers want to conveniently access high quality, healthy and sustainable foods. In response, many innovative consumer-driven opportunities for farmers to access markets are now available.
COACH will help coordinate strategies and disseminate good practices on how to strengthen territorial food systems and collaborative agri-food chains based on three building blocks: short food supply chains, civic food networks and sustainable public sector food procurement.
Key Project Outputs & Activities
Beacons Living Library on CLIP
A digital resource with more than 30 concrete examples showing how collaboration can help to scale up short agri-food chains to create win-wins for producers and consumers and drive locally led innovation.
The library includes examples of collaborative short food chains which we call ‘beacons’. Each beacon tells a different story of how to shorten food chains and reconnect food producers and consumers. For each one, collaboration between actors has been of vital importance – the beacons showcased in our library bring together farmers, civil society, local authorities and citizens with shared goals. You can use the library in different ways, via an interactive map and according to different ‘spotlight’ themes.