Organic Food for Youth in Public Settings: Potentials and Challenges. Preliminary Recommendations from a European Study

Summary

This report contains presentations from the four explorative work packages in iPOPY. The iPOPY project –
innovative Public Organic food Procurement for Youth – is one of eight transnational research programs
initiated by the 11 European countries participating in the CORE Organic I funding body network. iPOPY aims
at increasing the consumption of organic food among young people, especially in school meal settings but
also elsewhere, e.g. at music festivals. We work towards this goal by studying how organic food as well as
the organic concept in general has been introduced in public food serving settings in various countries, and
what may be the most promising approaches. Italy, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Germany are the
countries being studied. The iPOPY work packages explore policy issues, supply chain organization and the
impact of certification, the users’ perceptions and participation in the food system, and the health impacts of
organic food implementation.
By June 2010, iPOPY will be completed. Hence, this report is linked to the last iPOPY seminar arranged
during the BioFach Trade Fair in Nuremberg, Germany. We arranged similar seminars also in 2008 and 2009.
These seminars presented the situation with respect to organic school meals in many different European
countries (2008) and in more detail in iPOPY countries as well as some relevant cases (2009). Proceedings
are available from the 2009 seminar (Nölting et al 2009), and all presentations from the 2008 seminar are
found on the iPOPY website, www.ipopy.coreportal.org.
In the seminar in 2010, we will draw a link from iPOPY results to the municipality of Nuremberg, which has
ambitious aims as to becoming an Organic Model City (BioModellstadt). This includes far reaching goals for
the share of organic and regional food served in public schools and kindergartens. Further, the project
results will be linked to the general situation for school meals in Europe. For this presentation, no written
paper is available, but we will present the slides on the website. From the project we present preliminary
recommendations and conclusions from the four explorative work packages.