The EFF-CoP landscape
The European Food Fraud Community of Practice (EFF-CoP) is a collaborative “landscape” that unites stakeholders across the food supply chain to tackle food fraud through shared expertise, resources, and innovation which is pictured by the lego landscape. It serves as a dynamic "landscape" of actors—including government bodies, academic institutions, industry representatives, certification scheme owners, commercial laboratories, technology providers and clusters of other European projects —working together to safeguard food integrity across Europe and evolving over time. Rather than functioning as a centralised authority, EFF-CoP thrives as a COMMUNITY, a network of networks, bringing together existing initiatives, databases, and professional groups involved in food fraud prevention and detection. The community includes various already existing networks, such as the Food Authenticity Network, the Food Industry Intelligence Network, the Food Fraud Network, IFOAM, etc. However, many of these are fairly uniform in membership, sometimes based on the type of organisation (e.g. food industry, regulators, academics), sometimes because of provenance resulting in silo’s in the landscape.
In this landscape, the EFF-CoP project facilitates open communication, mutual learning, and coordinated action. It helps align fragmented efforts but it especially connects by creating encounters between different actor groups through workshops, virtual cafes, digital platforms, and knowledge-sharing events, the Community fosters collaboration across borders and disciplines. The aims is to start new conversations and make all contribute to a collective intelligence greater than the sum of its parts.
As a "landscape", EFF-CoP reflects the complexity of food fraud challenges, which will evolve with new developments and risks we will face in the future. As a "network of networks", it amplifies impact by linking complementary efforts, driving systemic resilience against fraud in the European food system.
