A new recipe for protein shift

Mission: At 2040,  9 out of 10 meals consumed in Sweden are within the planetary bounderies. 

We have chosen an inclusive mission as all the ingredients on the plate offer great opportunities for sustainability and health gains. The term "within the planetary bounderies" is an accepted concept that points out environmental processes that are crucial for life on Earth. All these processes are affected by human activities. For each of the environmental processes, researchers have defined safe limit values, based on today's scientific evidence. Here are also guidelines for a sustainable and healthy diet (EAT-Lancet Commission, Beal et al., 2023 etc) that the platform will be based on. If 9 out of 10 meals are to be within planetary bounderies, it must consist of foods that are sustainable from both an environmental and health point of view but also maintain price levels for different socio-economic groups. Therefore, the mission cannot unilaterally address a protein shift, but also other components such as carbohydrates, fat, salt, sugar may need to be shifted.

In order to meet the great challenge and achieve the mission, innovative Food Tech is a crucial enabler, but needs to be supplemented with cross-disciplinary knowledge and methods about how to get sustainable products to market as well as how to reach consumers to create demand, e.g. behavioral science on factors such as affects our food choices. Sustainable and healthy foods need to be available to everyone, i.e. not exclusive and expensive, but everyday food that is visible in stores and appealing to everyone. Not least, food must taste good and inspire you to prepare and serve meals at home, in public kitchens or in restaurants. To achieve the mission, the innovation platform together with actors within and outside the food system will work systematically based on various future scenarios to produce innovations on both the supply and demand side.

A central aspect is also to enable actors and innovations from other domains to contribute to the food system of the future. Sweden is a highly ranked innovation country in the world with high-class innovations in, among other things, Green technology and life science. The mission also contributes more broadly to other strategic goals such as achieving carbon neutrality in agriculture by 2050 at the latest, targets for biodiversity set by the EU's strategy for biodiversity to the year 2030 and takes into account the recently published Nordic nutrition recommendations that have set levels for intake of food groups , taking into account the health and environmental effects of the diet.