Food4Sustainability brings a comprehensive approach to addressing challenges in fostering healthy and sustainable consumption patterns, combining innovative food education strategies with robust policy and governance perspectives. The CoLAB’s multidisciplinary team, with extensive experience in public health, nutrition, digital tools, and food education, leverages its network of 15 founding members to develop holistic interventions that bridge digital literacy, consumer engagement, and sustainable food choices. Through its ability to bridge academic research, technological innovation, and practical implementation, F4S is uniquely positioned to contribute with projects that seeks activities related with food policy innovations, food systems mapping, food education and capacity building interventions, consumers behavior, sustainable diets, school food and food waste.

Food4Sustainability (F4S) is a not-for-profit collaborative laboratory dedicated to innovation in sustainable food production and consumption. Its concept and circular production systems approach were developed through a collaborative process with relevant national and international stakeholders and experts as part of BGI’s collaboration with the Idanha-a-Nova municipality and involved various partners from the EIT Digital, Climate KIC and EIT Food networks.

F4S aims at developing and testing innovative and sustainable approaches to the intensification of food production, building capacity of food systems ‘actors in the adoption of state-of-the-art solutions and providing education and experimentation to relevant communities of interest. F4S has 15 founding members, including 4 research and higher education institutions, 2 industrial companies, 5 tech-based SME, 3 producer-focused organizations and is led by BGI, an international start-up/scaleup accelerator. F4S leads the agri-food digital innovation Hub (SFT-EDIH) with over 20 players in the food value chain to support and collaborate in delivering digital services from farmers to consumers. F4S offers webinars, courses, and workshops through the F4S Academy to disseminate knowledge on sustainable practices and runs various projects aimed at transforming food systems and promoting digital innovation in agrifood. F4S has a laboratory dedicated to soil microbiota analysis based on NGS DNA sequencing.

F4S has been working in different national and international projects aiming to raise awareness on sustainable and healthy production and consumption of food. F4S is currently working with producers, consumers, municipalities, schools, NGOs and SMEs, implementing capacity building projects, health and wellbeing programs, food education awareness campaigns and dynamization of short-supply chain in public and private canteens. Its interdisciplinary team has vast experience in food production, food processing, agribusiness, digital tools for agriculture, entrepreneurship, public health, nutrition, food policy and data science.

F4S leads the National Network for Balanced and Sustainable Food, a research and innovation project designed to address challenges in the Portuguese food system through comprehensive mapping, integration, and strategic collaboration. The network aims to establish a dynamic observatory that maps and analyzes food systems across 22 territorial food partnerships, supporting decision-making processes and identifying priority interventions. By bringing together 13 diverse entities, including research institutions, agricultural associations, SMEs, and public sector organizations, this network creates a collaborative platform for transforming Portugal’s food systems through participatory engagement and strategic knowledge sharing.