Presentation
Food systems across Europe and the UK are falling short on health, climate and equity outcomes. This study combines interviews and workshops with changemakers across seven countries and the EU level with bibliographic mapping, a researcher survey and a scoping review to identify barriers to transformation and priorities for investment. Findings highlight five recurring barriers: entrenched power, difficult policy environments, polarisation, fragmentation, and evidence that is poorly suited to implementation. We identify four investment priorities: more applied research, stronger links between evidence and decision-making, long-term collaboration, and more effective narratives. These priorities support targeted, longer-term and transformative funding pathways.
Suggested citation
Aubert, P-M., Headings, R., Reynolds, C., Zurek, M., Garnett, T., Harding, A. et al. (2026). Moving the needle on transforming food systems: What’s blocking progress in Europe and the UK and where investments can help. Report.
Related Publication
Key findings and recommendations
- Changemakers consistently emphasised the need for dietary change as a priority for enabling food system transformation. They especially emphasised a shift toward more plant-based diets (particularly fruits, vegetables and pulses), alongside reduced consumption of animal-source foods and foods high in fat, salt and sugar. One common approach for dietary shift was changing food environments5 to make healthy and sustainable choices easy, attractive and affordable.
- Changemakers identified seven priority action areas to reshape food environments and support these shifts, largely reflecting realist or reform-oriented approach:
1. developing public procurement policies;
2. supporting local food interventions;
3. getting retail and food services to change their offer;
4. supporting product innovation;
5. developing fiscal measures;
6. regulating marketing;
7. repurposing agricultural subsidies
- Efforts to advance these actions face five overarching barriers across the stakeholkders and research workstreams:
• Structural power imbalances which tend to favour actors invested in maintaining the status quo, particularly where dietary shift and reducing consumption is concerned;
• Unfavourable policy and institutional frameworks which are hard to navigate;
• Polarised public and political debates;
• Fragmentation across both practice and research communities;
• Impractical, inaccessible or inadequate evidence, particularly on how to achieve change politically and economically, and limited uptake of evidence in decision-making.
- We identify four priorities for future investments:
• Reorient the research agenda towards applied research, especially in evaluation, economics and politics/political economy;
• Strengthen links between evidence generation and decision-making by (1) involving changemakers throughout the research process and (2) supporting research translation and synthesis;
• Support long-term, multi-actor collaborations;
• Build compelling, evidence-based narratives and framings that can influence policy and public discourse.
- The above priorities apply differently to various action areas across geographic regions and time scales and lead to three concrete recommendations:
• Near-term impact action areas: Strengthen public procurement, support local food interventions and strategies, and support retailers and food service providers,
• Build change over the long-term: Further explore action areas that challenge food system structures such as product innovation and reformulation, fiscal measures, marketing and advertising and repurposing agricultural subsidies. These areas require deeper feasibility and political economy analyses to identify where to invest, with what potential for impact and with whom to unlock progress These areas also require greater synthesis and translation of existing evidence.
• Transformative opportunities: There is significant potential in funding research and interventions which explore transformation pathways more broadly, focusing on socio-cultural, political and economic factors beyond the seven action areas examined in this study.
