e-Trust: Building trust for quality assurance in emerging markets for food chains

The vision of the e-Trust project is to provide consumers with high quality food they do trust and can afford. The combination of trust and affordability can be reached through improvements in trade processes and in the communication of trustworthiness between trading partners along the chain. The project delivers concepts for trade relationships that combine actual e-commerce developments with trust mediating functionalities. It will support both, improvements in consumers’ food supply situation and the competitiveness of the European food sector. This project is highly relevant to the Food Quality and Safety Priority as it contributes to the well-being of European citizens through high quality, safe to eat, affordable food. The project creates consumer confidence through transparent, trustworthy food chains able to deliver guarantees to consumers and ensures the affordability of high quality food by exploiting the efficiency power of e-commerce for food chains. The project bridges the gap between the innovative ICT potentials for costefficient processes in the European food chain and the trust between companies in the food chain. The project will setup a network of European experts in the fields of food chain management, food quality and trust in food chains from different European countries, Turkey, Brazil, and the US to cover food import to the EU. Business representatives from the European food sector will act as intermediaries and multipliers to SMEs in the European food sector and will organize the participation of SMEs in the project in order to reach the largest possible number of SMEs in the European food sector and the dissemination of the project’s results to SMEs in different European countries by organizing workshops, conferences and brochures to SMEs.