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Packaging has a crucial role in the food supply chain as it is an essential element to address the challenges of sustainable food consumption. Food packaging has the ability to reduce food waste by protecting and preserving the quality and safety of food products throughout the desired shelf-life.

The EU Green Deal sets important goals to further advance the sustainable transition of the food packaging value chain, encompassing:

• Ensuring that all packaging in the EU market is reusable or recyclable in an economically viable manner by 2030;

• Defining measures to reduce packaging waste;

• Promoting the incorporating of recycled content in packaging materials.

While the proposed European targets and measures are still under debate, the focus is clear. The European food packaging value chain needs to transition to a resilient circular economy centred on prevention (refuse), reduce, recycling and reuse of food packaging materials. To achieve this transition, investments and collaborative efforts among industrial stakeholders in the food packaging value chain, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), are essential!

Goal
Value4Pack aims to strengthen interregional collaborations, support innovation, and bridge gaps between different stakeholders by creating an inclusive ecosystem and providing targeted assistance, to boost innovation and investment capacity in the European food packaging value chain. Value4Pack is an Interregional Innovation Investment (I3) project, originating from the European S3 Partnership Food Packaging.

Collaboration is key
By facilitating interregional cooperation, Value4Pack will increase the capacity for companies in the food packaging value chain, to engage in interregional innovation projects and initiatives, develop new business ideas, and make concrete interregional innovation investments for validated solutions that meet their needs.

Core activities
To reach this goal, the core-activities of Value4Pack are:

• Connect and align the actors along the European food packaging value chain, inducing a harmonized understanding and vision of food packaging. To create awareness among stakeholders about each other’s needs, and to translate their needs to challenges for their industry.
• Perform an interregional value chain analysis to identify the innovation gaps in the entire food packaging value chain and the food packaging innovators. Facilitating cross-fertilization of food packaging innovations, know-how and best practices between regions through matchmaking and networking events, to close the innovation gaps.
• Support regional stakeholders, in particular SMEs, and facilitate the further elaboration of interregional investment projects via interregional matchmaking and knowledge exchange, workshops for stakeholders, etc.
• Development of regional roadmaps indicating short, medium and long-term innovation/investment trajectories for the food packaging value chain.
• Development of a joint-action plan for interregional investments in the food packaging value chain, engaging stakeholders (in particular SMEs).

Moreover, through its bottom-up approach, Value4Pack will also support regional authorities in the entrepreneurial discovery process for the S3 priorities linked to food packaging, to design evidence-based and targeted policy interventions in the long-term.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or EISMEA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.