Research projects, training and reports

This project is a vision for a Yorkshire food system constituting regenerative and equitable healthy eating for young children, supported by regenerative hybrid food economies and regenerative farming.

It will look at interventions in food retailing and farming to address issues such as childhood obesity, sustainability in agriculture and global warming.

Bringing together world-class researchers from Sheffield, Leeds, Bristol, Cambridge and City universities, this project seeks to transform the UK food system ‘from the ground up.’

It will use an integrated programme of interdisciplinary research on healthy soil, healthy food and healthy people (H3).

The project will:

• evaluate and refine regenerative agriculture measures to protect and restore soil health
• use innovative methods such as hydroponics and biofortification
• consider consumer demand, public acceptability and affordability.

Preliminary work has shown that people living in disadvantaged communities have the desire to eat a healthier diet and are aware that good nutrition is closely linked to good physical and mental health.

This project will focus on sharing knowledge and learning from working withpeople from a variety of disadvantaged communities in:

• Whitley-Reading
• Brighton & Hove
• Tower Hamlets
• Plymouth.

It will also work with small and large food businesses and policy-makers.

This will help develop solutions that will provide people living in disadvantaged communities with improved access to fresher food and a balance of desirable, sustainable, affordable and healthy products.

It will identify opportunities to prevent food loss from ‘mainstream’ supply chains and identify where increased sustainable production of primary food ingredients is needed.

Focusing on the city of Birmingham, this consortium brings together internationally renowned teams from the universities in Cambridge, Birmingham, Warwick, Exeter and London.

It aims to transform the urban food system and its relationship with its regional economy in the West Midlands.

Mapping the local food system will determine the most powerful levers for system change. These are likely to include new ways of procuring healthier and more sustainable foods in the public sector. It will also include the development of online systems to help businesses find and use more locally grown food.

The project will evaluate interventions to demonstrate how food can be made healthier, more affordable and less harmful to the environment, but still profitable.

In the UK, food consumed out of the home accounts for a significant proportion of the impact of diet on health and the environment. For example, 42% of workers eat at a canteen and seven million school lunches are served daily. In response, we will deliver a simple tool that:

• generates a 15-30% reduction in both the carbon footprint of meals and their sugar, fat and salt content
• can be implemented without compromising food acceptability and without consumers even being aware that changes have been made
• will be ready for immediate application at a city-wide level and beyond.

We recognise the bold nature of these claims. However, they are grounded on our modelling of food choices in a real-world context – a university catered hall of residence.

Raising the Pulse (RtP) is a systems analysis of the environmental, nutritional and health benefits of pulse-enhanced foods. It’s based on the concept that if we could make it easier for the UK population to eat more UK-grown pulses, there would be considerable health and environmental benefits.

This project aims to demonstrate the socio-economic benefit of a world-leading ‘terrestrial blue economy’, contributing multiple public goods to reform UK agriculture.

Combining high value shrimp aquaculture with farm-based renewable energy will provide a novel home-grown output with considerable but poorly understood economic and health potential. The public goods benefits of a switch from beef/sheep production to shrimp include:

• lower greenhouse gas emissions
• less water pollution
• better land use.

Our vision is to maximise the food potential of UK pasture by using targeted chemical processing and novel biotechnology to convert grass into nutritious edible fractions for healthier and more affordable alternative foods. This will help to make UK agriculture more resilient and sustainable.

Our research will focus on the distinctive role of social enterprises (trading with a core social and environmental purpose), exploring and enhancing their unique contribution to food systems that are more inclusive, sustainable and healthy.

We will use the research findings to co-design resources and toolkits to support the scaling-up or replication of successful models and innovations, and the sharing of good practice across the country.

This project focuses on how cultured meat could affect farming in the UK. This is relevant to its environmental, economic and animal welfare impact, and to public and political attitudes that will shape how it gets regulated. Cultured meat is commonly assumed to be a threat to farmers, producing food in ways that could put some out of business. However, nobody has actually looked into this in-depth, or explored these issues with farmers in the UK.

Our project will seek a consensus on the increasingly contested role of livestock in the UK agricultural economy, balancing its market value and opportunities for innovation with its less tangible contributions to food systems, health, rural economies and social wellbeing. We will substantiate consensus with evidence of the innovation potential in production systems (for example, genetics and breeding techniques), and with reference to public preferences for the future of livestock systems in the UK and internationally.

BeanMeals aims to develop and analyse systemic innovations (i.e. innovations that require collaboration between multiple actors) for reducing the consumption of products high in fat, sugar and salt in institutional and home-cooking by using UK-grown navy beans.

Our research will develop a new ‘fork-to-farm’ model for the systemic innovation of dietary change, which can be seen as ‘reverse engineering’. The model will start with the preparation and consumption of the meal, and work backwards though the ‘missing middle’ (i.e. the retailers/wholesalers, distributors, secondary and primary processors, and the associated logistics), to the grower.

Our project will use a combined behavioural, food technology and predictive modelling approach, informed by close collaboration with industry. By doing this, our research will identify what transformation in the UK wheat agri-food chain is needed to deliver high fibre white loaf bread to consumers. We’ve developed the project in collaboration with:

• Asda and their associated millers and bakers (Allied Technical Centre)
• seed producers (Limagrain)
• UK wheat chain associated bodies (UK Flour Millers and the Agricultural Horticultural Development Board)
• a grain broker (Agricole).

Our combined consumer behaviour and food technology studies will determine the acceptability of fibre-rich white bread. Meanwhile, economic behavioural studies will focus on how sectors in the wheat agri-food supply chain (production to manufacturing and distribution) relate to one another.

We need to support a major transformation of the food system, focusing on the production and consumption of healthy and sustainable food. The Sus-Health project will establish and demonstrate a blueprint of a system that incentivises both directly and indirectly the consumption of sustainable and healthy food.

The project will demonstrate how the use of a co-designed, combined measure of environmental impact and nutritive value (the Sus-Health Index) of foods, meals and ingredients can influence the future direction of our food system and the stakeholders within it.

Our research will co-develop and test strategies that can support future transformative potential in the food system, bringing together:

• food insecure people living with obesity
• consumers
• retailers
• policy makers
• academics.

We have a diverse team of academic experts in social science, applied health, obesity, and data science. We will combine our knowledge of large-scale population data with an understanding of lived experiences of food shopping for people living with obesity and food insecurity to develop practical solutions to promote sustainable and healthier food choices in this group.

The UKFS-CDT aims to develop the next generation of food system change makers for a healthy and sustainable food future.

From 2021 to 2027, the UKFS-CDT will train over 60 interdisciplinary doctoral researchers capable of leading the UK towards a resilient, healthy and inclusive food future, with the first cohort starting in autumn of 2021.

Policies have been described as the ‘control knobs’ that can be adjusted to achieve system change. Understanding which policies do, or could, influence food systems is therefore an important part of catalysing transformation.

But information about food systems policy levers tends to be fragmented across different policy sectors or disciplines, with no overarching picture of the available options and their relationships to one another.

This research, published in October 2021, generated a map of policy levers organised by food supply chain segment and developed a taxonomy of broad types of policy lever. Because of the importance of considering the overall coherence of the policy approach to food systems, the project also explored the relationship between different policy levers.

The findings begin to document in one place what we know about how these different food systems policy levers impact on one another, or ‘interact’, and where particular mixes, or ‘policy packages’ of levers are being used in combination.

This report, produced as part of a project to explore policy levers for food systems transformation, presents a case study on food public procurement (FPP), examined through the lens of food system transformation.

We applied a ‘food systems approach’ to the policy lever of FPP to explore its potential role in food system transformation. The report describes:

• what the lever of FPP is and its relation to policy
• who makes FPP policy, using the example of England
• which food system activities FPP could transform
• which food system outcomes FPP could transform
• food system synergies and trade-offs related to FPP
• examples of FPP innovation from around the world
• how this lever is connected to other policy levers.

It draws together these findings to propose an ideal-type model for food public procurement in a healthy and sustainable food system, where FPP is supported by a package of complimentary policy measures to maximise its transformative potential.

The research, published in November 2020, draws together publicly available data sources, public documents and research articles to map and quantify the food system.

The findings reveal the economic value of the UK food industry while highlighting a number of negative outcomes in the current system. These include:

• a heavy reliance on imports
• skills shortages
• poor working conditions
• unsustainable production methods
• diet-related disease.

The published report by the University of Exeter focusses on the impacts and consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic across the UK food system through synthesising the emerging results and findings of the various UKRI- funded Rapid Response Projects, as well as other UK-focused Covid-19 and food system related research projects.

The purpose of the report was to understand how Covid-19 had impacted (and how it was continuing to impact) the UK food system with a view to addressing 2 key questions –  what can we learn from Covid-19 for transforming the UK food system and how can lessons from Covid-19 help us to build back a better food system for improved human and environmental health?

The report outlines 6 main takeaway points for future resilience in the food system to external shocks. It looks at the lessons learnt throughout this time within the different sectors, and how these lessons should be incorporated into future research in the food system in order for us to build back better.

This new report commissioned by the Transforming UK Food Systems Programme lays out a flexible approach for creating more strategic and holistic behaviour change initiatives using food business behaviours as an example.

Developed using literature-based studies, qualitative interviews and conference discussions.

The novelty of this report is in its use of behavioural framework models alongside holistic behavioural mapping to help guide thinking about shifting business behaviour rather than just individual behaviour.

The report sets out a 4-step approach to using visual behavioural factor mapping, the COM-B framework & the Behaviour Change Wheel to create more strategic behaviour change. The COM-B framework and Behaviour Change Wheel are particularly important when considering intervention methods and are used widely in the public health sector. This report recognises their utility outside the public health space and demonstrates their use in identifying behaviour change interventions more broadly, as a part of a 4 stage process, using food business behaviours as an example.

Utilising public procurement as a way to transform the sustainability of the food system holds great potential, especially when focussing on school meals supplied by local authority catering services. This transformative change can impact young people far into their futures, sparking their interest in this topic and teaching them fundamental and valuable lessons about food, sustainability and health from a young age. To fully harness this opportunity, unpacking and mapping out public food procurement supply chains that lead to school meals is crucial.

Learning about the factors that shape and influence this part of the food system, the barriers, enablers and contracts that dictate how the system works, leads to a deeper understanding that allows for relevant and important solutions to be formed.

This research identified that fundamentally, local authorities lie at the heart of many public sector food supply chains into school meals. With local authorities being able to write their own tendering bids and specify terms, whilst also often being responsible for designing school food menus, their decisions impact the whole school food system. Current supply chains into public procurement are dominated by price, and lack in traceability in terms of provenance, and therefore social and environmental sustainability credentials. Enabling local businesses and SMEs to enter these supply chains could challenge these issues. Implementing practices and systems that allow local authorities to procure more sustainably not only promotes and supports suppliers that are implementing sustainable practices but this positive impact directly increases school children’s accessibility to healthy, sustainable food.