Despite the holidays, summer has been an intensive period for the ACR+ staff involved in the FOODRUS project. Workflow has been produced on many fronts and here it is just a short summary of the main activities that took place during the past months:

• Preliminary inventory of legal and economic barriers across the FVC stages. A preliminary literature review has been performed to get a closer insight into the current barriers that prevent citizens and businesses to adopt sustainable  food waste management approaches in their daily lives. The collected information has been integrated with the feedback received from the pilot countries that have identified the national-level legal, economic and behavioral limits that have so far emerged. All this information is being collected and prepared for a Europe-wide survey on food waste prevention barriers that is expected to be published on the ACR+ website by the end of the year. Foodrus partners and stakeholders will be invited to, not only validate the collected data by providing feedback through their own experience, but they will be also prompt to propose improvement approaches to current legislation and business practices that could help achieve greater impact in food waste reduction. The survey will be open for participation to all Food Value Chain actors interested in identifying legal, economic, technical and behavioral improvement most needed to end food waste.         
• Contribution to KPIs identification and shortlisting to evaluate food waste prevention measures. The Foodrus process of KPI identification and prioritization is coming to an end. After an initial consultation with key sectoral experts, the identification of food waste reduction KPIs is now at its third phase where involved parties are ranking previously shortlisted KPIs based on a 6 different criteria, including digitalization.  
  
• Extending the geographical reach of impact through the incorporation of 3 new Associated Regions. The Foodrus project has recently welcomed 3 new Associated Regions willing to participate in the process of testing innovative solutions for food waste reduction. These regions are our ACR+ members Arnhem-Nijmegen Green Metropolitan Region, Amsterdam Metropolitan Region and the Catalan Waste Agency, covering for food waste prevention activities in the Catalunya, Spain.
• Discussing on FWR priorities and replicability approaches. Existing and new Foodrus Associated Regions participated on 15 October 2021 to a Replication meeting organized by ACR+ where talks have been initiated to define in more detail how solutions being tested in the pilots can be replicated in other territories, and how to strengthen the information flow between demonstrator (pilots) and replicators (associated regions). The use of IT platforms to improve this process is currently under evaluation.