Sustainable Innovation Pilot 1

Fruit producers in Greece, like Proodos Farmers’ Union, face sustainability problems, as their farms are small, fragmented and in different microclimate zones, facing high inputs costs, lack of financial resources for investments, and they use old production methods that result in increased inputs consumption while damaging the environment. Thus, it is needed to reduce their production costs and increase their revenues in an environmentally friendly way. ALTERRA is a food processing company working closely with Proodos in order to produce high quality frozen fruit products, offering better prices to farmers for high quality products, but they need to prove the high quality to their customers and being able to get a certificate like GLOBALG.A.P and, the local brand label. Challenge: Support the production of frozen fruits and certify high quality products whilst developing brand value.

Sustainable innovation pilots activities:

a) Establish Gaiasense in Proodos fields, a Smart Farming (SF) solution building on multiple data types that helps minimizing the applications of inputs (water, fertilisers, pesticides). Gaiasense business model focuses on offering a subscription based service with a small annual fee and zero investment from farmers. Gaiasense production data will feed Alterra to produce a traceability solution that will help in collecting all the needed data to secure certification and sustainability related labels, like GGFSA.

b) Measure the additional value created by the collaboration between Proodos and Alterra that enabled securing certificates and labels based on the data collected and shared, and propose a fair redistribution among them.

c) Proodos members will use the collected data as a secondary evidence for monitoring and traffic lights system of the Future CAP.