Center for Research in Agri-food Economics and Development (CREDA)-UPC-ITRA

This is Lab4supply

THE LAB4SUPPLY PROJECT

Multi-agent Agri-food living labs for new supply chain Mediterranean systems. Towards more sustainable and competitive farming addressing consumers’ preferences and market changes

LAB4SUPPLY FINAL CONFERENCE

MAY 30, 2024. UPC CASTELLDEFELS (BARCELONA, SPAIN)

Overview

LAB4SUPPLY is a Research and Development project that aims to provide a practical solution to address the current difficulties of Mediterranean smallholders and traditional farmers. The Project will create two levels of stakeholders’ interaction by developing an Agrifood Stakeholders Platform (ASP) and a digital Decision Support System (DSS) ICT tool, to maximize outreach and beneficial influence of the project results and reach the target users. The project will offer an innovative and viable alternative solutions and opportunities to allow the smallholders to increase their competitiveness and profitability, using optimized agri-food supply chains and improving adaptation capacity to unexpected market changes, which at the same time will be better perceived by the consumers.

PROJECT PRESENTATION

LAB4SUPPLY´s MAIN OBJECTIVE is to empower agri-food smallholders in the Mediterranean ..

Living Labs in action

The project main objectives are:

Project Objectives
1. To map the current added-value chains for five key selected products in four case studies (tomatoes in Spain, goat for milk and meat in Algeria, chestnuts in France, and carobs in Morocco) and an inter-country common product (figs).
2. To design and develop an innovative methodology to analyze selected supply chains (from farm to fork) that will integrate economic, social, and environmental indicators.
3. To understand consumers' behavior, opinions, and non-hypothetical willingness to purchase and pay a premium for sustainable food products.
4. To constitute an Agrifood Innovation Ecosystem (AIE) living-lab (LL) as an arena to collect information from the food sector and consumers and to transfer and apply the new optimized models.
5. To create two levels of interaction between stakeholders: 1) a physical agri-food stakeholder platform (ASP) and 2) a digital decision support tool (DSS), to maximize the outreach and beneficial influence of project results and reach target end-users.