At the core of FUSILLI are 12 Living Labs in 12 different cities, whose main objective it is to develop urban food plans within their local contexts to achieve an integrated and safe holistic transition towards healthy, sustainable, secure, inclusive and cost-efficient food systems. FUSILLI thus follows a multi-objective approach of implementing feasible and replicable innovative urban policies, which will lead to the improvement of actions in all stages of the food value chain, in line with the four priorities of the EU’s FOOD2030 policy:

• nutrition for sustainable and healthy diets,
• climate-smart and environmentally sustainable food systems,
• circularity and resource efficient food systems and
• innovation and empowerment of communities.

The 12 FUSILLI Living Labs will implement different innovative actions across all stages of the food chain:

• production and processing,
• distribution and logistics,
• consumption,
• food loss and waste and
• governance.

FUSILLI will not only include all relevant processes but also all kinds of actors (e.g. farmers, researchers, consumers), policy sectors (e.g. health, agriculture, environment), governance levels (e.g. local, national, global), and functionalities (e.g. healthy diets, access to food, employment, and cultural identity) in its research and policy efforts.

The Living Labs aim to identify best practices on food system transformation and to share them with the so called FUSILLI Knowledge Community (KC). Through close cooperation with other projects and fellow initiatives, the cities will be empowered as innovation agents for the development of long-term urban food planning throughout learning from each other about successful policies and actions.

The knowledge transfer will be based on an open and public digital platform as a repository to organise, document and share actions, initiatives, policies and impacts in relation to the targets associated with the FOOD2030 priorities. The goal is that this Knowledge Community will exist beyond the project lifetime and thus constitute a relevant foundation through close cooperation with other projects and fellow initiative for the extension of the knowledge sharing towards many other cities.