D3.1 Communication Toolkit CUES - Empowering Consumers Through Food Industry Change: Strategic Value of Transparency

This document presents Deliverable 3.1 of the EU CUES project, which aims to empower consumers to make more sustainable food choices by supporting change at cultural, industry, and policy levels. At the industry level, the EU CUES project equips actors in the food value chain with tools and strategies to enhance their transparency, traceability, and trustworthiness to promote sustainable food options for consumers.The Communication Toolkit is a practical guide for food value chain actors on how to create and capture value through transparency across the food value chain. It is grounded in the dynamic capability framework (Teece,2018) and draws on desk research and a multi-actor participatory approach, including eight co-identification and co-creation workshops held in Italy (TCA), Greece (KEPKA), Iceland (LOKI Foods) and Hungary (KLT) during 2024 and 2025. These activities resulted in creating the Toolkit into three sections: “Awareness”, “Action”, and “Aspiration”. The “Awareness” section explains the strategic value of transparency and how it creates value for individual food value chain actors as well as for the wider food value chain. The “Action” section presents the intervention Scenarios identified through the co-creation workshops, organised into three context-based pathways: one for short food value chains (Scenario A), one for collective branding in large food manufacturing firms (Scenario B), and one focused on the empowerment of smallholders (Scenario C). It also provides a step-by-step guide to implementation, highlighting digital communication solutions that strengthen transparency and trustworthiness within food value chain Business Models. The “Aspiration” section focuses on considerations for scaling up interventions, describing how actors can sustain and expand impact once an intervention and its digital tools become part of everyday operations.