Transforming the food system for health and sustainability: Unleashing social innovation through collaborative research

How can publicly funded research foster a sustainable and fairer food system?

A study led by researchers at Middlesex University’s Centre for Enterprise, Environment & Development Research (CEEDR), part of the UKRI-funded Transforming UK Food Systems programme, examines how social innovation can address diet-related ill-health and environmental challenges. This following article is written by the report’s lead author, Dr Ian Vickers, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Middlesex University.

With mounting evidence of the harm caused by the false economy of Big Food, how is publicly funded research helping to address the huge cost of diet-related ill-health and the unsustainability of the dominant food system?

This is the focus of a recent study led by CUSP researchers at Middlesex University in collaboration with researchers at Sussex University. The context of the new report is provided by the UKRI funded Transforming UK Food Systems (TUKFS) research programme.

Our study examined how many of the TUKFS projects are applying the principles of social innovation: new strategies, organisational designs and collaborations for meeting urgent and under-addressed social and environmental challenges.

Our study looked at the experiences of 12 invited TUKFS projects and included a review of their research proposals and other documentary evidence as well as interviews with projects leaders and practice partners. The findings provide new insight and lessons for academics and early career researchers looking to work across disciplinary and organisational boundaries, as well as for policy makers, food enterprises and others who wish to see a more sustainable and just food system.

Unlike top-down innovation that is driven by Big Science and powerful corporate interests, social innovation aims to be much more participatory and inclusive of neglected voices. In the case of the food system, there is a need to include the ‘bottom-up’ concerns of many smaller enterprises and organisations with a role in sustainable food and wellbeing issues: farmers and other food enterprises, caterers in schools and hospitals, those delivering community health and wellbeing services, as well as many people who would just like a greater say as concerned consumers and citizens.

Our study found three core areas of social innovation practice and potential which were often overlapping, and sometimes complementary to other more sci-tech based innovations around new food products and agricultural processes.

Firstly, over half the sample of TUKFS projects were found to be working with social enterprises – businesses that trade with a social or environmental purpose – or had had created new mixed purpose ‘hybrid’ businesses as vehicles for inclusive social innovation. For instance, one project had set up a new community interest company to function as an umbrella organisation that is co-owned with the project’s industry partners, including farmers, traders, processors and food technologists.

In other projects, social enterprise partners were delivering innovative wellbeing services and activities, such as market gardening and social cookery classes that bring people and communities together while promoting healthy nutrition and sustainable local food.

Secondly, most of the projects were using education and behaviour change to influence – or ‘nudge’ – peoples’ dietary habits and wider patterns of consumption. Such approaches were often focused on children and young people, including a collaboration with primary and secondary schools to design teaching and learning curriculums to build understanding of sustainability issues and to support healthy food choices. A couple of projects had seen the development of games designed to engage children – and their parents – in fun ways with the environmental and nutritional impacts of different food items, while building ‘farm to fork’ understanding of the wider food system.

Thirdly, most of the projects had adopted what can be broadly described as systemic (or joined-up) supply chain approaches to developing fairer and more resilient local or regional food systems. Important here have been the new collaborations and partnerships which have catalysed the efforts and ideas of partners from industry, government and civil society as well as academics from different research disciplines. In one case, a regional alliance involving millers, bakers and farmers had been set up to support sustainable local production. In another, a city-wide transport initiative for food delivery to disadvantaged communities had initially been introduced during the Covid pandemic and further developed as a strategic response to food poverty. Enabling the bottom-up voices and understanding of people’s lived experiences as consumers and as users of community wellbeing services was crucial in several of the TUKFS project cases.

For innovation to be genuinely transformational, central and local government are key top-down’ actors with the power to drive transformative change through decisions on public spending, including support for R&D and enterprise, and better regulation of food standards. Examples of TUKFS projects involving public sector actors to enable evidence-based policy as a lever for change include government procurement of local healthy food and menu change in hospital and school catering services.

The findings show how the TUKFS projects have provided novel research and innovation spaces that creatively combine the knowledge of academics from different disciplines with the practice-based learning of partners from the civil society, private and public sectors.

New collaborations and partnership can themselves give rise to misunderstandings and tension – one academic reflected on the need for participants to be open to learning from different perspectives:

“There are bound to be clashing viewpoints, conflicts [and] trade-offs and the only way those can really be resolved is if people rework their perspectives and appreciate other perspectives. I think these challenges, unless they are touched, we will not have social innovation or systemic innovation.”

The next step for many of the TUKFS projects is to further disseminate their innovations and share their learning more widely. Interviewees highlighted a range of challenges and barriers that they were seeking to address, including the market dominance of ‘Big Food’ and the limited resources of the TUKFS partnerships and of participating smaller enterprises:

“If they scale up one of the barriers to this is what they call routes to market. So they produce something innovative and some organic product or whatever it is. They might be able to sell it to a few local shops that are veggie or whatever. But to get into a supermarket is a massive challenge and if they do get into a supermarket, they have to meet all kinds of criteria that kind of undermine what they’re about in the first place.”

A further challenge is the lack of sufficiently joined-up policy and government ‘silo thinking’, such as rigid policies towards public spending to procure catering and other services that tend to favour a small number of large corporate players.

Surmounting these and other barriers will require a much more supportive ecosystem for food and wellbeing related social innovation that is also more responsive to local/regional differences and the needs of different communities. The sustainable food places emerging across the UK are an important part of a such a joined-up ecosystem to which some of the TUKFs projects have been making valued contributions. However, the report also makes clear that there is a need for a much more concerted national policy framework if the opportunities for transformative innovation for the wellbeing of people and planet are to be fully realised.

A version of this article was published on the CUSP website. Picture by the Early Years Foundation.

The full report can be downloaded via the UKRI website.

Vickers, I., Lyon, F., Psarikidou, K. & Kirtley, A. (2024) Social Innovation for Food Systems Transformation: Lessons from the TUKFS programme. London: UKRI-Transforming UK Food Systems Strategic Priorities Fund.