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Making food system impacts visible, understandable, and actionable – through precision, participation, and open knowledge

Each year, over 450 million people consume 1.6 billion tonnes of food and drink. How that food is grown, moved, and consumed shapes far more than dinner — it reaches into human health, economic stability and the environment.

In 2022 alone, the EU produced 271 million tonnes of cereals, 160 million tonnes of raw milk, 22.1 million tonnes of pig meat, and 3.5 million tonnes of fish. While this supports food availability and livelihoods, it also places a heavy strain on ecosystems.

Agriculture accounts for 11% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions, while also contributing to soil degradation, water pollution, biodiversity loss, and land-use pressure – all made more urgent by climate change.

At the same time, food systems must respond to rising concerns around food security, fairness, and economic resilience. Balancing these environmental, social, and economic demands is one of the EU’s biggest challenges, but also opportunities.

FOODTURE is a European research and innovation project working to change how we understand and improve our food systems.

The project builds next-generation impact assessment tools using advanced Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodologies. Nine work packages carry this out, from mapping what Europe actually eats to measuring the environmental, social, and economic pressures behind how that food is produced and consumed.

The foundation is data. FOODTURE is building Europe’s largest database of Life Cycle Inventories (LCIs) for food products, drawing on satellite data, drone monitoring, and spatial analysis to make food’s hidden impacts visible. Farmers, businesses, policymakers and researchers can then see, and act on, what was previously invisible. Our case studies show what this looks like in practice, from crop production to aquaculture.

Data alone doesn’t change a food system. So, FOODTURE also provides open-access tools, policy briefs, practical guidelines, and training opportunities to support real change across the agri-food value chain, without compromising productivity.

None of this works without collaboration. Partners across research, industry and policy sit at the same table throughout the project, which is what lets FOODTURE move from documenting the problem to shaping a workable answer.