About agroBridges

New Horizon 2020 project agroBRIDGES starts with the aim of building bridges between consumers and producers supporting them to establish short food supply chains

We are happy to announce the start of agroBRIDGES, a coordination and support project funded by the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Programme Horizon 2020. It aims to build bridges between producers and consumers, empowering farmers with practical knowledge and support to rebalance their market position through new business and marketing models based on Short Food Supply Chains (SFSC). With a duration of 36 months and a budget of almost 3 Million Euros, the project brings together a strong consortium from 11 different countries to this end.

In particular, the agroBRIDGES project will develop an innovative agro-food multi-actor framework, bringing together a wide range of stakeholders and practical support tools to better connect producers and consumers. It will foster the establishment of sustainable business and marketing models based on SFSC models with less intermediaries and an improved market position for local producers.

As a step forward from traditional support tools that rely mainly on facilitating communication and event organization, the novelty of agroBRIDGES is based on the implementation of meaningful tools and resources for producers that can be easily used in practice to set up and run SFSC. For example, this includes decision support tools for producers to choose the most sustainable business model by comparing different scenarios or creating producer networks to take advantage of economies of scale.

The tools delivered by the project will be thoroughly tested and validated through its multi-actor framework, including 12 Multi-Actor Platforms spread across 12 respective geographical regions in Europe. This way more than 400 people from the agri-food sector will be involved, directly participating in knowledge exchange, co-creating, and co-developing project outputs together with project partners.

Along these lines, the project’s expected impact is to co-develop new business and marketing models based on SFSC that have the potential to increase 35% of their income by minimising intermediaries’ margins. At the same time, it is expected to contribute to a 5-8% increase of farms involved in direct sales to consumers in the long term. On the shorter term, 150 persons will be trained on topics related to food procurement and how to mobilise innovative agri-food supply chains and support local producers.

The agroBRIDGES consortium, led by Q-PLAN INTERNATIONAL (Greece), includes a total of 15 partners: Q-PLAN INTERNATIONAL (Greece), TEAGASC – Agriculture and Food Development Authority (Ireland), FruitvegetablesEUROPE (Belgium), Teknologian tutkimuskeskus VTT Oy (Finland), Wageningen University (Netherlands), CREA – Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (Italy), Institute of Technology Tralee (Ireland), Food & Bio Cluster Denmark (Denmark), Fundación Corporación Tecnológica de Andalucía CTA (Spain), Unimos Foundation (Poland), VEGEPOLYS VALLEY (France), Sabri Ulker Foundation (Turkey), Rezos Brands Agrifood Company (Greece), Sustainable Innovations Europe (Spain), Hub Madrid SL (Spain).

AgroBridges Project