Rethinking packaging for circular and sustainable food supply chains of the future

Food packaging is designed to protect the food through its supply chain, communicate to customers, and to ensure food quality, safety and optimal shelf life. Progress is now needed to secure its circularity, minimize food waste and improve sustainability. CIRCUL-A-BILITY will go beyond the state of the art by jointly addressing the major technical and non technical hurdles for implementation of sustainable food packaging solutions within future circular food supply chains. A food specific, focused action is critical amongst the ongoing debate in sustainable packaging. It is important to share data on the consequences of specific food product – package interactions and to keep the behavior of consumers as a critical focus. CIRCUL-A-BILITY will organize a pan-European network of actors involved in all aspects of food packaging, including material scientists, food scientists, industry end-users, consumer scientists and policy makers. The network will actively work to harmonise and integrate food packaging related research, share information, support industry in the implementation of sustainable packaging systems, create authoritative working groups able to give science based recommendation to consumers, user groups, policy makers and industry. It is expected that such COST action activities will 1) valorize the current technical advances, 2) speed the preparation of prototypes beyond the interest of single stakeholders and to the benefit of the European landscape; 3) avoid duplication of efforts in research in adjacent fields; 4) accelerate technology transfer and entrepreneurship; 5) elevate the scientific capacity and research ranking of the COST working members.