The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major stress test for the agri-food system. While most research has analysed the impact of the pandemic on mainstream food systems, this article examines how alternative and local food systems (ALFS) in 13 countries responded in the first months of the crisis. Using primary and secondary data and combining the Multi-Level Perspective with social innovation approaches, we highlight the innovations and adaptations that emerged in ALFS, and how these changes have created or supported the sustainability transition in production and consumption systems. In particular, we show how the combination of social and technological innovation, greater citizen involvement, and the increased interest of policy-makers and retailers have enabled ALFS to extend their scope and engage new actors in more sustainable practices. Finally, we make recommendations concerning how to support ALFS' upscaling to embrace the opportunities arising from the crisis and strengthen the sustainability transition.

Agriculture is one of the fastest growing sectors. Therefore, movement towards sustainable development requires strong knowledge bases that will be constantly updated. This tendency poses a question about the ways of knowledge sharing. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to investigate the role of information, cooperation and sharing experiences of good practices among farmers in order to develop agricultural sector, and to introduce the Community of Practice as a powerful tool for creating strong network among all key actors of agri-food value chain while considering the experience of the EU SKIN project. In this paper, besides empirical analysis of the related literature, we describe the model of Community of Practice created on base of best practices collected under the project SKIN (Short Supply Chain Knowledge and Innovation Network - H2020). Findings highlight the Community of Practice is able to keep the balance between formal and informal learnings thus minimising the difficulties of understanding and eliminating the informative gap.

Short Food Supply Chains (SFSCs) are central to the alternative food movement discourse. SFSCs are based upon the interrelations among actors who are directly involved in the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food products. They depend upon actors mobilising resources of various kinds: skills; knowledge; labour; capital; buildings etc. External factors such as policies and regulations can also encourage the creation of these shorter chains. The development of SFSCs can still be hindered by a range of other factors. Nevertheless, bottlenecks can be overcome via the sharing of information on successful SFSCs through the dissemination of Good Practices between various actors and territories. The Short Supply Chain Knowledge and Innovation (SKIN) project uses the term ‘good’ rather than ‘best’ practice to draw attention to the subjective lens through which a practice is ultimately evaluated by an end-user. This paper first outlines the many issues that confront SFSC actors which represent bottlenecks to the adoption of ‘Good Practices’. It then documents the Good Practices collected as part of the SKIN project as tangible examples of how SFSCs overcome such challenges. Lessons learnt from project highlights are subsequently assessed in an effort to mitigate and offer solutions to the challenges associated with SFSCs. The paper demonstrates the considerable latent potential inherent to SFSCs. However, in order for the agricultural sector to realise the full promise of short supply chains it must first be conscious of the issues pertinent to their prosperity.

This paper aims at conceptualizing the approach followed in designing the building European network within the H2020 project “Short Supply Chain Knowledge and Innovation Network”. It was brought together literature regarding the adoption of network analysis and the development of short food supply chain in order to describe the role of the regional nodes as means to transfer knowledge along and between local food systems around European areas. This resulted into the framework of SKIN network design. The approach is devised to overcome the parochialism of local food systems, and structure an interconnected design among economic players to fulfill regional and global impacts in knowledge transfer.

Nowadays a growing interest in how agritourism could be able to promote alternative nutrition stands out. The increase in the number of elderly has determined a desire for quality of life improvement; consequently, more attention has been paid to the role of food and their contents. A diet comprising Functional Foods could help not only to improve life quality of an aging population, as these foods are potentially capable to improve health and well-being; but they could also reduce health risks or delay the onset of serious pathologies. Moreover, scientific evidence of the correlation between diet and health for the elderly population, having a sedentary lifestyle and even a constant increase in healthcare costs, have addressed the interest in healthier food products. The aim of this paper was to design new food-based paths for agritourism farms that could promote health, nutritional and cultural values. To define these paths, a two steps analysis was carried out: (1) opinion collection from elderly and agritourism operators and (2) definition of a logical framework. Results highlighted that differentiating what is offered could increase health levels of elderly and create new multi “functional” shapes for agritourism farms aimed at both offering local and Functional Foods for elderly and at spreading social-tradition values.

This study aims at providing a framework to find out best agro-food practices and foster their spreading to European actors operating in Short Food Supply Chain (SFSC). Quick knowledge circulation allows a reduction of asymmetric information among such operators. These latter frequently imply an excessive level of transactional costs that negatively affect farms economic sustainability. Hence, reduction of costs is an important priority. The methodological approach is carried out within the SKIN project, analyzing metrics parameters to assess SFSC economic sustainability. It will create local hubs to collect knowledge from each European area where stakeholders operate, through the identification of adequate regional nodes, connected among themselves. Network will enable a real knowledge transfer and innovation uptake. Lastly, the network will be exploited to enhance the added value of involved farms.

Dairy companies are often strong product developers driven by economic viability, whereby new technologies may offer increased market shares as consumers are seeking interesting products with specific benefits. This chapter aims to deal with consumer acceptance of, or resistance to, and even opposition to particular dairy products strongly characterized by their technologies and to illustrate social dynamics in the dairy market in industrialized countries. It then describes a new dairy product development process as a way to respond to consumer insights and approaches in a compatible way. The scientifically promising new technologies of high-pressure processing (HPP) and pulsed-electric field (PEF) are methods that are able to preserve the product characteristics such as color, flavor, nutritional values and sensory properties better than conventional technologies like pasteurization. Finally, the chapter concludes by outlining relations between consumers and dairy industries as ways forward to develop new products and their technologies, entailing societal acceptance and product promotion by communication.

Rehydrated legume seeds represent an important ingredient for ready-to-cook fresh soups packaged in a modified atmosphere. The aim of this work was to define an image analysis system for the evaluation of ‘Borlotto’ bean color changes during storage in different gas compositions. ‘Borlotto’ bean seeds were rehydrated in water for 12 hours and stored at 5 °C in controlled atmosphere using 4 different gas compositions: 3 % O2, 10 % CO2 in air, 3 % O2 + 10 % CO2, and air as control. An algorithm in Matlab was codified to measure color of the seed red stripes and ground color (L*, a*,b*, Hue angle and Chromaticity). Sensorial analyses based on the hedonic scale (from 5=excellent to 1=very bad) of the seed appearance were also carried out. Seed color and appearance changes over time were monitored initially and after 5, 10 and 15 days of storage at 5 °C. The obtained data were used to model the quality of degradation attributes over time, that were fit into first order kinetics. A gas composition with 3 % O2 + 10 % CO2 induced the least modification on the seed ground color, which received a highest appearance evaluation up to 10 days of storage, also showing that visual appearance changes were mostly affected by the variation of the seed ground color.