The international conference "Building New Bridges in the South Western Baltic Sea Region" on 3 June in Lübeck was attended by more than 300 participants coming from Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Germany and brought together stakeholders from politics, business, administration and academia. It focused on the Fehmarnbelt Bridge as a trigger for regional development and innovation in the South Western Baltic Sea Region. The conference discussed the coming prospects opened by building the fixed link over the Fehmarnbelt.

Björn P. Jacobsen as our project representative played an active part in a workshop and introduced the audience to our baltfood project. Furthermore we manned a 'baltfood booth' in the conference hall and informed visitors about baltfood and handed out our current brochure.

The baltfood project partners involved in this work were Lund University, University of Turku and Agropolis Ltd. The main work was performed as a desktop research. In addition, views and feedback from representatives of food industry, research scientists and consultants were collected in a workshop and through an online questionnaire.

The main findings of this study can be summarized in following four topics: global versus local retailing, two consumption societies, product image versus product identity, and peripheral vision and thinking.
Food production and retailing has become a global business. At the same time, the consumers’ increased interest towards more locally produced food has become a clear trend mainly as a result of concern about food safety and ethical issues related to work conditions, farming and animal husbandry. The reason behind eating have also evolved from satisfying hunger to for example search for wellbeing and health, expression of social status and expression that one cares about the environment. These examples show that consumers associate certain images to certain foods and also expect certain characteristics from food products. Consumers’ form these images partly based on information given by the producer/retailer and true novel qualities e.g. functional properties but also on their own beliefs and assumptions which are not always inline with the truth. Therefore, distribution of information in understandable and reliable way concerning both health and sustainability characteristics of food is a challenge to whole food industry and will become even more important in the future as a result of increased prevalence of diet related problems, overweight and ageing and growing awareness about environmental effects of farming and food processing.

Growing interest for healthy foods and environmentally friendly products which usually are more expensive shows that some consumers are willing to pay for these additional characteristics but not all. The results of this research established that although the interest for products with additional value is growing the two most important qualities for the consumer when making the decision which product buy are price and taste. All other characteristics, including healthiness, environmental friendliness, origin, safety, outlook etc., come after these two.

In order to answer to the growing interest and need of food products with added value the food producers have to collaborate with other actors of food industry. They should follow and analyze food trends and research, and look for knowledge and information that are not commonly used.

To download the study and pictures follow this link

Since the Baltic Sea Region re-established itself 20 years ago, regional cooperation has been driven by high political and economic ambitions. The EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region was introduced in 2009 to address key challenges and untapped potential of this large region, covering about one third of the total area of the EU.

To ensure that the Strategy succeeds in taking cooperation in the Region to higher levels, new ambitions and targets now needed to be discussed. The place and time for this deliberation was Gdansk, the 24-26 October 2011, during the 13th Baltic Development Forum Summit and the European Commission’s 2nd Annual Forum on the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region, also co-organised by the Polish EU-Presidency, Pomorskie Region and the City of Gdansk.

baltfood attended this exhibition with an own stand in cooperation with beltfood, the network for the food processing industry in the Fehrmarnbeltregion. Both networks could present their projects and achievements in the field of transnational cluster-building and

-management.