Sustainability assessment of the food chain: how to do it scientifically and practically?
Session Chairs: Christopher McHardy & Sergiy Smetana

In order to implement the 17 UN sustainable development goals, the food industry must act now, by lowering its environmental impact. Our sector needs to go beyond greenwashing and purely marketing-based approaches, to show consumers and other stakeholders that we are committed to change. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as an accepted quantified system of food system assessment is facing numerous challenges and opportunities associated with the demand for the data on environment, social and economic issues to be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). It is obvious that increased data complexity will require new developments and interlinkages between different aspects of sustainability and data handling.

Talk 1 - Social issues in sustainability assessment of food.
Dr. Ulrike Eberle, corsus corporate sustainability GmbH, Center for Sustainable Leadership (ZNU) of Witten/Herdecke University, Germany
Food plays an important role for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Therefore, tools to assess the sustainability of food are urgently needed in order to make value chains more sustainable.

Talk 2 - Challenges and recent solutions in executing food related LCA.
Laura Schumacher, PRe Sustainability, The Netherlands
The presentation will focus on some of the challenges I face when doing LCAs of agricultural and food products and some solutions recently developed.

Talk 3 - Software technology driven approaches for sustainability assessment in practice.
Manuel Klarmann, CEO und Co-Founder, Eaternity, Switzerland
Our future with sustainable nutrition today! Our diet causes 1/3 of CO2 emissions worldwide. Enough to make a significant contribution to our sustainability goals. With the Eaternity Score, the environmental impact of all food in the market is provided in a transparent and informed way to consumers and decision makers.

Talk 4 - Blockchaining food chains: Novel data approaches for sustainability?
Prof. Henning Høgh Jensen, DTU Copenhagen, Denmark
New developments in Food-Tech and Digitalisation-Tech will greatly influence our capability to govern food chains towards more sustainability, while simultaneously the same tech-developments will change the food chains themselves. This pitch will highlight some of the major developments that you should be aware of.

After the presentations, the speakers will be available for a fireside chat (panel discussion) involving the audience.

This seminar is part of a seminar series 'Sustainable Food Systems: Connecting Expertise in Academia and Industry'  organized by the Working Group on Sustainable Food Systems and Young EFFoST. It aims to provide detailed insights into various facets of sustainability in the food sector. The seminars include expert talks, practical indications from industry professionals, as well as short presentations from selected early-stage researchers. Access the programme of the full seminar series and the slides from previous seminars here.