May 29, 2025

During the last year, the Centre de Recerca en Economia i Desenvolupament Agroalimentari (CREDA) has been one of the partner centers in the European BREADCRUMB project, an initiative that arose as a response to the main problems of the implementation of food marketing standards, such as the generation of food waste and the rejection of ‘suboptimal’ food. Within the project, CREDA has been in charge of validating and estimating models that allow analysing changes in marketing standards throughout the supply chain.

Tafesse Gezahegn, doctor at the centre, together with Saray Ramírez, research support technician, and Yasmine Bedoui, doctoral student, who are part of the team involved in the project, explain where CREDA is at:

What is the current situation of CREDA in the project?

During the last months, CREDA has been developing three tasks in parallel.

On the one hand, the theoretical economic model aims to examine the impact of commercialization standards on the waste generated throughout the chain. Currently, the team is in the process of refining the model based on the comments received by the reviewing staff. The intention is to be able to better capture the dynamics of the market and ensure alignment with the widely accepted definitions of food waste.

As for WP4 ​​and the fish study case, CREDA, together with OPPPB, has collaborated with PNO to define the appropriate business model for the case, with the objective of adding value to the catches of fishing personnel, finding marketing alternatives for the products affected by FMS.

For its part, the Catalan team is in charge of creating a role-playing game (RPG) that allows validating an agent-based model (ABM) developed by UNIBO. Thus, with the analysis of their real behaviour, the aim is to identify the decision-making rules of all the interested parties.

Once the current tasks have been developed, the economic model will be tested with empirical or simulation data, deepening the viability of the fish business model, and an RPG protocol will be developed for the same case study.