When it comes to food, local supply chains are more important than ever, especially during crises like pandemics, wars, or climate challenges. While many regional food networks thrive on collaboration, they often struggle with logistics. That’s where the EU project Food4CE steps in, connecting farmers and logistics providers to improve how local food reaches consumers.
Why Local Food Matters
In Austria, the idea of eating local isn’t new. It’s rooted in the country’s agricultural tradition and has gained importance since the 1970s. Today, one Austrian farmer can feed about 100 people, compared to just 61 in 2000. This shift shows how much more efficient and essential local food systems have become.
Local food isn’t just about keeping shelves stocked—it helps preserve the landscape, sustain regional traditions, and even strengthen the European Union’s ability to handle global disruptions like supply chain bottlenecks.
Food4CE Tackles the Challenge
The Food4CE project brings together partners from Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, Poland, and Italy to improve local food networks. It focuses on alternatives to big supermarket chains, such as farmers’ markets, direct delivery of organic produce, or other systems where food goes straight from farm to consumer.
The project’s first goal was to study existing networks, identify what works, and pinpoint challenges. One major issue? Logistics. Farmers may have great products, but without efficient delivery systems, it’s hard to reach customers. To tackle this, Food4CE is setting up knowledge-sharing hubs across regions, encouraging collaboration across borders.
Austria’s Strength in Local Food
Austria has many successful examples of local food networks, often built over years of trust and hard work. Seasonal subscription boxes, like organic vegetable deliveries, are particularly popular. Many rely on modern logistics solutions, like optimized delivery routes and flexible pricing—where scheduling a non-urgent delivery might cost less.
Still, challenges remain. Even in Austria, farmers and food businesses could benefit from better coordination and new tools to improve efficiency and sustainability.
Breaking Barriers in Other Regions
While Austria’s networks thrive on strong community connections, other regions face different challenges. In some post-Soviet countries, for instance, mistrust between farmers, distributors, and consumers slows progress. Building trust is key to creating networks that can grow and support more people.
“In Austria, we have great competence at all levels of alternative food networks,” says Strauß. “But every participant also has weaknesses – be it in logistics, sustainability or efficiency improvement measures”.
Next Steps
In the project five local and one transnational innovation hub will be launched to enable knowledge transfer between researchers, business experts, food producers, logistics operators and policy makers, thus creating a unique mutual transnational support network for Central European AFNs.
The Austrian Innovation Hub, based at the University of Applied Sciences at BFI Wien, has been launched in the last few weeks (contact for interested parties: David.Strauss@fhvie.ac.at or +43/660/8556944).
From October 2024, the activities will also be bundled on a Knowledge Transfer Platform, followed by Matchmaking Platform in February 2025, which will serve as a dynamic hub for key players in the alternative food networks to connect and collectively contribute to a more sustainable and equitable food system.
The article is extracted from a publication of Die Presse: https://www.diepresse.com/19047032/bauer-sucht-frau-war-gestern-heute-geht-es-um-logistikpartner