CHORIZO: Our New Horizon Europe Project to Tackle Food Loss and Waste Through Social Norms

The three-year CHORIZO project will take an innovative approach to tackling food loss and waste through gathering insights on social norms in a range of food-related settings and generating effective ways to apply behaviour change techniques in six real-life case study contexts.

Food loss and waste (FLW) is a topic with far-reaching consequences across the spectrum of economic, environmental and social spheres. It’s also a topic that involves a range of different actors from agriculture through to end consumers. While behaviour change around FLW has attracted a lot of attention for a number of years, the CHORIZO project, which stands for Changing practices and Habits through Open, Responsible, and social Innovation towards ZerΟ fοod waste, aims to approach it from a different perspective. The project will look into evidence of what works from the lens of social norms – in other words, the common ways of behaving within particular groups or societies – and how that links to food waste.

At the heart of the project is the gathering of results from relevant social norms and FLW actions, resulting in a database of evidence that will be developed with the use of advanced modelling techniques. The database will generate findings that can be applied to a variety of case studies, from hotels to schools to food banks. Within the project, the CSCP will develop actor-, context- and gender-specific guidance to change social norms as well as provide capacity building for a range of stakeholders on how to use such knowledge impactfully in their work.

The CHORIZO project is funded under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research programme and will run for three years (2022-2025), led by a consortium of 14 European partners.

Photo by Anton Murygin on Unsplash.

For further questions, please contact Rosalyn Old.