Knowledge Transfer Tools for Enhancing Sustainability

The majority of SMEs needs repeated explanations and evidences to be convinced about the feasibility of adopting measures for improving sustainability. This is a particularly challenging task since meeting the requirements of business growth, reduction of environmental impact, social responsibility and good governance at the same time requires complex thinking and ability to find trade-offs. Human and financial resources of SMEs are usually limited. It is difficult to motivate them to change their practices until they can’t see that these changes improve or at least maintain the viability of their business and will bring them clear benefits and relatively quick return of their invested efforts and resources. Although everybody agrees that the reduction of the environmental impact and increasing the social responsibility of food and agriculture businesses is unavoidable and beneficial for the society in general, SMEs are not convinced that their additional costs and efforts will be acknowledged by the customers and consumers. If during the explanation of the sustainability requirements the main emphasis is put on the environmental aspects this message may not be satisfactory effective to persuade food SMEs to take actions, particularly in the less affluent countries. Similar typical causes of the reluctance to act on improving compliance to environmental and social requirements were found in the Latin- American countries and in Hungary, which include the following arguments and concerns:• The smaller is a business, the smaller is its contribution to the total environmental impact.• Many other businesses including larger ones than us can continue to make business without making major changes in their activities. Why should we make the first step? Is it a real consumer requirement?• Who will cover the additional costs of the changes, sustainability measures?• Our limited resources have to be focused on production. We do not have time to spend on measurements and calculations. Why shall we share our data with our competitors, why shall we give them information, what they can use for competing with us

Networking Related to Sustainability in Hungary

Sustainability is arguably one of the greatest challenges to Hungary in the future. The question is how to meet this need and tackle this challenge that requires commitment from the different players of the supply chain.This aim of the work within the FP7 Salsa project was to detect, explore the importance of sustainability and categories of the sustainability by the actors of the network and identify those elements related to sustainability issues, which support the future success along the soya and beef supply chain.In Hungary majority of the soy and beef enterprises are classic SMEs.The topics was quite “hard” for the questioned SMEs, because in one hand it is an increasing needs for sustainability, but in the other hand the environmental concerns haven’t acquired as significant awareness in Hungary as in western countries within the European Union. The needs regarding sustainability can be identified mainly from farmers and wholesalers (particularly multinational companies)., but most of the cases significant activities or changes have not been made yet.The producers emphasized that they fulfill the sustainability requirement if it is a real needs from their customers or without risking their success of their businesses. The other frequently mentioned answer was that they dealt with the sustainable aspects if it supports the most efficient use of the natural resources or the better quality of the product.Sustainability was associated with costs. The participants all agree that the cost of sustainability can be fairly high. However there is a significant need for sustainable production and products in Hungary, they do everything to meet the requirements of the sustainability standards. But in that case the members of the supply chain can see clearly the profitability of their investment in sustainability.Based on the results we could conclude that there is a harmonized, good business relation between the stakeholders within the Hungarian soy and beef supply chains. The power relations are different within the soy and the beef chains. Within the beef supply chains the wholesalers make the rules, and in spite of this, within the soy supply chain the bargaining power depends on the size of the soy production per year and on the market trends.Finally we could conclude that there is a real need from the players of the supply chains for collaboration, because only with the collective changing will contribute to enhance sustainable development in Hungary

Related to Sustainability: Challenges and Barriers

The aim of this study was to identify challenges and barriers related to sustainability issues within the Hungarian agri-food sector. Within the SALSA EU FP7 project a survey was carried out which helped to evaluate the current status of the Hungarian food supply chains related to sustainability challenges.The specific issues, which have to be considered, is the use of soy products and ingredients containing soy products in food, the consumer concerns about the use of GMO, and the sustainability of the soy and beef supply chains.In Hungary the general interest related to the sustainability issues is still lower than within the North-West European countries. The results of the survey will be delivered in the presentation and discussed several topics according to the status of the Hungarian agri-food chains members’ awareness related to the “Triple Bottom Line”

Consumers’ Acceptance and Attitude towards Bioactive Enriched Foods

The aim of our research was to explore the consumers’ attitude towards healthy diet and food consumption and measure the acceptance of these types of products on the product portfolio developed in PATHWAY-27 projects. The benefit of the experiment was to have a better understanding on HTAS based questionnaire with using real prototypes of bioactive enriched foods with potential health claims. The results showed clearly, that unusual appearance and flavour have negative effect on the opinion of the product and the positive health effect also increases the acceptance of the products

Harmonising stakeholder’s preferences, needs and acceptance on sustainability and technical aspects to develop specifications for biodegradable packaging material

For the development of new biodegradable packaging materials and decision support tools, expectations, requirements and knowledge of different disciplines need to be harmonized and integrated.Within the EU funded EcoBioCAP project a systematic approach was applied. Packaging development brief was developed, technical and consumer survey was carried out. Specifications are used as a starting point for carrying out the research tasks in a harmonized way.For a systematic approach for setting the targets of the research and considering technical requirements and consumers needs, the use of these management tools is essential in the early phase of the research and development projects

Importance of Coordinated Interactions of Multiple Stakeholders for Developing Products with Health Claims

During the development of products with health claims the collaboration and interaction of several disciplines and independent partners is necessary such as the production, quality, marketing, legal functions of the company, the external providers of the knowledge on the constituent having the claimed physiological effect, the clinics carrying out the human intervention studies, statisticians, laboratories providing testing services, etc. This results in a higher dependency from each other and less flexibility compared to the development of a conventional product where mostly in-company functions work together. Therefore systematic coordination of the multiple interactions, careful design of the product and its development process is particularly important

Food Awareness and Transparency: Current Practices and Future Tools

Within the SmartAgriFood project the envisaged functions of Future Internet (FI) were collected and explained to the business users. 135 in depth interviews in 6 countries, and 8 focus group discussions in 5 countries were carried out for identifications and evaluation of the potential applications in the agri-food chain in the Smart Food Awareness area. Privacy was seen as a key function of the FI. The majority of the potential application ideas were rated as applicable to ensure improved awareness for the food chain members. There is a need for systematic explanation of the new enabling functions of the FI to the potential business users in a user-friendly way to foster the identification of new application opportunities. In some cases there is a difference between the priorities set by them and the behaviour of the consumers

The origin of the particular aroma of noble rot wines: various fungi contribute to the development of the aroma profile of botrytised grape berries

During noble rot (NR), B. cinerea, together with other filamentous fungi and yeasts, play a role in developing the unique aromatic profile of botrytised wines. To gain more insight into the latter, we generated metatranscriptomic data representing the four NR stages (I-IV) from the Tokaj wine region of Hungary over three months. Since previous research has indicated that the most prevalent filamentous fungi and yeast include Alternaria alternata, Botrytis cinerea, Epicoccum nigrum, Aureobasidium pullulans and Rhodotorula graminis, RNAseq reads were aligned to the latter species. A weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) followed by a non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS), eigengene ANOVA and enrichment analyses were performed. Amongst the ten generated gene module clusters, enriched pathways involved in synthesising aromatic compounds such as amino acid-, carbohydrate- and lipid metabolism co-jointly expressed by all filamentous fungi and yeast were identified within the turquoise module. Furthermore, it was found that the enzymes involved in the synthesis of aromatic compounds are expressed and up-regulated during the later stages (III-IV) of the NR process. This study has indicated that the unique aromatic profile of botrytised wines is due to the contributions of filamentous fungi and yeasts belonging to the NR grape microbiome, with the main aromatic contributions occurring during the later NR stages