The UK food system is broken; it relies on practices that have profound negative socio-environmental consequences. For instance, currently 4.7 million people in the UK experience food insecurity while 3.3 million tonnes of food are left unused on UK farms, creating a significant environmental burden. Meanwhile, UK farmers face increasing pressures from the public, government, and food corporations to simultaneously meet economic and environmental targets and embrace technological advances - robotics, digitalisation, genetics. Increasing the circularity of the UK food system is necessary to address these challenges and drive equity and resilience.
There is great potential to foster innovation in food and agricultural systems through exploring (a) how circular decision-making, i.e. decisions that create economic, social and environmental value, can be supported both at individual, organisation and system levels, (b) how actors within this system can work together as a community building trust and creating complementarities to enable innovation and closing the loop, (c) how a digital Hub can support network orchestration to facilitate collaboration and exchanges of resources and/or by-products (d) how accessible data and information sharing can be facilitated through digital technologies.
This project aims to co-create a digital hub solution to enable a UK circular food system in the context of the apple supply chain. An interdisciplinary academic team (computer, operations management, agricultural, environmental and social sciences) will work with industry experts, SMEs and third-sector organisations from the food sector. The project partners are representative of the communities we have engaged with along the supply chain (i.e. farmers, cider makers, surplus redistributors, food banks, agricultural experts). Our overarching aim translates into the following objectives:
O1. Leverage interdisciplinary and participatory approaches from the computer, agricultural, environmental, social and management sciences to offer novel and equitable ways to drive the UK's transition to CFS.
O2. Co-design digital services grounded in the needs, preferences, values, capabilities and constraints of food system actors to enable the transition to CFS and create value for local actors and for nature.
O3. Support circular decision-making in the food system through mapping, integration and evaluation of economic, social and environmental flows and data and by optimising the supply chain.
O4. Prototype and deploy a digital Hub solution pilot centred on apples and provide new scalable and adaptable learnings for other contexts.
O5. Disseminate findings and learnings from the work widely through innovative physical and virtual means to inform local and national policy and practice.
The Hub will be co-created and delivered with its community of users by increasing user engagement and decision-making. Digital inclusivity underpins the Hub, this means working with farmers to develop user-friendly digital solutions and give them agency to make data-driven decisions. The Hub will connect less powerful players in UK food supply chains, provide new routes to access fresh fruit and vegetables and create new economic opportunities. It will support a transition to the circular economy in several other ways. The project will produce scalable solutions that can be applied to other UK produce. It can be extended horizontally (e.g. raspberry seeds are already used in cosmetics production) and vertically (e.g. apple waste as input for future proteins i.e. insects) creating new industry in the UK. It will contribute to the UK's net zero and biodiversity targets and help guide policy to increase the resilience of UK food supply chains.
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