City – Country – River

Regional value creation and more transparency in the food sector

A sustainable and efficient food system of the future is characterised by more regional products and regional added value, as well as increased transparency in purchasing. Farmers and gardeners can obtain better information about the needs and purchasing behaviour of their customers at the click of a mouse in order to match supply and demand. The joint project "Stadt-Land-Fluss" or SLF for short, aims to close the existing knowledge gaps along the way with digital approaches.

Artificial Intelligence for regional supply

The regional nutrition system is to be ­strengthened through digital data collection ­and processing, using the Berlin-Brandenburg region as an example. ­To this end, a prototype for a digital, interoperable and scalable ­platform for nutrition data is ­being ­developed and linked with Artificial ­Intelligence (AI) ­methods.­ This will facilitate the collection and evaluation of potential for regional commodity chains. Data on regional food production is not currently abundant, and the same can be said for (daily) food consumption and demand for these products, available production areas, delivery routes, packaging types and much more. There is also a lack of technical systems that are usable and publicly accessible for the evaluation of such data.

Proven inter 3 methods in use

inter 3 supports and advises the project with its competences in the visualisation of production and commodity chains with the proven RePro approach. For the development of a software-supported, semi-automated ­assessment of regional supply scenarios, inter 3 uses concepts of participatory multi-criteria analysis, which are adapted in stakeholder workshops according to the requirements in "Stadt-Land-Fluss".

The project has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) for a period of three years since June 2021 and is coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems FOKUS. inter 3 was commissioned by the project partner Hochschule für Nachhaltige Entwicklung Eberswalde (HNEE).