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Regenerative Agriculture can only scale when people, planet and profit thrive together. Regeneration of the land starts with the restoration of natural systems – soils plant & animal health, biodiversity and water systems -, But for farmers to regenerate the land at scale, regeneration of the food system is needed.

Balanced products are meat, dairy or fish preparations that are enriched with plant based ingredients. Substantially reducing the animal content while benefitting taste, texture, nutritional value, CO2 footprint and price/affordability.

Upcycled products and ingredients should be widely adopted by food manufacturers, on supermarket shelves and food service offerings. That’s the ambition of the new Upcycled4Food Initiative, launched by Foodvalley’s Upcycling Community.

Foodvalley is working with Upcycling Community partners and other stakeholders on a position paper on Upcycled Food and Ingredients. The position paper will seek alignment between various stakeholders on the definition of upcycled food and ingredients, their attributed values, and how these should be communicated in the industry — all the way up to the consumer.

The Global Food Upcycling Map shows instantly who’s doing what and where in the food upcycling ecosystem.

Foodvalley NL, together with Rabobank and Interprovinciaal Eiwitoverleg, are supporting crop-oriented value chain initiatives that contribute to a higher consumption of Dutch-grown plant-based proteins. Increasing the local availability, processing and consumption of plant-based proteins not only contributes to our protein self-sufficiency, but it also has the added benefits of greenhouse gas emissions and nitrogen runoff reduction and increased biodiversity.  

The Protein Transition Map NL offers an interactive platform showcasing the economic value of the Dutch alternative protein ecosystem.

We believe that the solution to transition agricultural practices by farmers lies in cross value chain collaboration, where all partners work together in facilitating the farmer, put in the central, to transition towards regenerative practices. This is not an agricultural transition but more a value chain transition that needs a collaborative approach to come to scale. 

The journey to healthier food options can be challenging. To collectively tackle barriers to limited R&D access and a fixed (technological) mindset, we created a Practical Guide for Reformulation and Innovation.

ReGeNL is working alongside Dutch farmers to develop a future-proof agricultural sector, where farming goes hand in hand with soil improvement and nature restoration, while ensuring a profitable business model for farmers.

Since 2020, the Netherlands has had a National Protein Strategy (NES), developed in line with European ambitions to increase protein self-sufficiency. Over the past few years, it has become clear that the Netherlands, with its wealth of knowledge and innovation, can contribute far beyond its own borders. While other countries and regions are actively scaling up their sustainable protein solutions and connecting supply and demand on a global level, the Netherlands has yet to fully engage internationally. That’s why exploring an international component of the NES is both timely and necessary to ensure Dutch expertise and innovation in sustainable proteins can make a global impact.

The VIPS pilot (Vitality & Interaction via Personalisation Solutions) is a pilot driven by a multi-disciplinary coalition of selected Personalised Nutrition (PN) Partners to help better to understand the customer journey in a mass market setting.

The short chain project Gelderland ‘Local food in the Gelderland supermarket’ aims to get more local products sold locally through the supermarket channel. The project will run from April 2024 to April 2026.

In 2022 the Bean Deal agreement for protein rich crops, in which 56 Dutch stakeholders, including regional and national governments, have committed to far-reaching objectives related to the uptake of protein rich crops for human consumption. The Bean Deal (also known as the Green Deal) is also a steppingstone for future initiatives (Co-fresh, Dutch Protein Farmers). This initiative continues into 2023 and beyond.

Insects are a good source of protein and champion the valorisation of waste streams that are otherwise difficult to valorise. At the same time, insects as a raw material are not yet economically viable to use and legislation currently often still prohibits their use for human consumption. Therefore, Foodvalley is working to set up a successful showcase that is possible within legal boundaries.

This initiative seeks to improve the economic viability of locally produced crops in the Netherlands by bringing together protein crop farmers, creating critical mass and increasing valuation by the end users. This approach helps to organise a better value chain position for the farmers by, for instance, exploring the cooperative selling of their product as well as equipment sharing. This would result in a first national cooperation of growers of leguminous crops moving from niche to critical mass.

The Co-fresh pilot case assembled a coalition that focuses on creating a competitive European value chain for fava beans that uses local sources and reduces carbon footprint. We expect to have the value chain quantified and an agreement on shared value/revenue distribution in place by October 2023.