ECO Conference 2021
29 November 2021
On June 29th 2021, SAFE hosted the Dual Food Quality Conference: Empowering Consumers Organisations to tackle Dual Food Quality alongside consumer organisations Associazione Difesa Orientamento Consumatori (ADOC) and InfoCons.
The conference aimed at presenting the outcomes of the ECO Project, while also bringing together prestigious stakeholders in order to share intakes on dual food and find paths to collectively tackle the issue. The conference provided a chance to both discuss the many aspects and findings of the project, but also gave a chance to various stakeholders affected by the issue of dual food quality to bring forward their views and expertise on the matter.
Panelists included:
- Natasha Foote (agri-food and health reporter at EURACTIV, conference moderator)
- Floriana Cimmarusti (Secretary General, Safe Food Advocacy Europe)
- Silvia Cugini (Regional President ADOC Piemonte)
- MEP Francisco Guerreiro (Greens/EFA, European Parliament)
- Cesare Varallo (Food Lawyer, Food Law Latest)
- Franz Ulberth (Joint Research Center, European Commission)
- Iulia Lazar (InfoCons)
- Marco Mongillo (EU Public Affairs, Ferrero)
- Alessandro Mostaccio (Movimento Consumatori /EESC)
The « Empowering Consumer Organisations: towards a harmonised approach tackling dual quality in food products » (ECO) project was a European project funded by the Consumer Programme of the DG Justice of the European Commission, which ran from September 1st 2020 to August 31st 2021.
The ECO Project was developed to educate European consumer organisations on the issue of dual food quality (DFQ), empower them to identify and denounce misleading practices, and expand on the testing conducted by the Join Research Council (JRC). DFQ is the practice of selling identically branded products with a different composition and/or nutritional values in different countries within the European Union. Intellectual outputs from the project include: training videos, a guidance and manual on Testing Food Products and Identifying Misleading Branding Strategies, a Collection of Good Practices, a Certification Scheme as well as an interactive searchable online platform comparing over 150 products across (at least) 3 Member States.
To find out more about the project and testing campaign conducted, head over to the ECO Project website at https://www.fightdualfood.eu
Replays from the conference are available on our Youtube channel!
