Deliverable D1.6 - Valuation toolbox

This report presents the Valuation Toolbox which comprises a set of tools designed to evaluate the use of biodiversity in food, fields and landscapes. Some of these tools had been (co-)developed by DIVINFOOD’s partners prior to the project’s launch, but the report details the work carried out by the partners to incorporate Biodiversity Use Criteria into these tools, and places this work within the broader context of a range of evaluation tools used by the Living Lab’s members. Biodiversity Use Criteria are the benefits of using agrobiodiversity that consumers consider most important when they choose food. Building on the consumption white paper and on the SMART indicators developed across the project, consumers in seven DIVINFOOD Living Labs in Denmark, France, Hungary and Italy ranked six such criteria in 2025: health and nutritional benefits; support for local farmers and the economy; holistic environmental benefits; biodiversity as a specific value; landscape beauty and heritage; and climate robustness. The tools into which DIVINFOOD’s partners have incorporated the Biodiversity Use Criteria are as follows: the Open Food Facts citizen-sourced database of food products, the Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) used by producers in the Living Labs, and existing consumer feedback and rating systems. The work carried out by partners has yielded tangible results: - Open Food Facts: Open Food Facts extended its multilingual ingredients taxonomy with all of the neglected and underutilised crops (NUCs) identified in DIVINFOOD, added a database field that flags products containing them, and created a biodiversity knowledge panel that is displayed in its app and website whenever such a product is scanned or viewed. The panel carries all six Biodiversity Use Criteria to consumers at the moment of choice. Contributors and partners added more than 11,000 products containing NUCs during the project, and by June 2026 NUCs were detected in 33,511 products, or 2.6 % of the products in the database that have an ingredients list. A user survey tested the relevance of this integration; its results, including a quantitative analysis of the responses, are presented in the companion deliverable (D1.7). - Participatory Guarantee Systems: mes Producteurs mes Cuisiniers (mPmC) and INRAE co-developed a PGS through four workshops with the Bean-Lyon Living Lab (LL), producing a charter, a technical standard, an evaluation checklist and a business model. The technical standard contains a control point on the benefits of agrobiodiversity use whose six sub-items correspond to the six Biodiversity Use Criteria. The method developed in this LL is now being replicated in other LLs of the project. - Consumer feedback and rating systems: The Conscious Consumer app in Hungary now recognises NUCs, legumes and grains when consumers scan the ingredient list of a packaged product, and responds with a positive, reinforcing message, while its recipes offer practical ways of cooking these crops. The Eachthing scanner app, which was to be updated in Denmark, is no longer in operation, and this part of the work could not be implemented. In order to put this work into context, the partners also identified the evaluation tools used by the members of their living labs, and the project team added others of which it was aware or which it was using, resulting in a list of 27 evaluation tools. One of them was developed as part of the BIOVALUE project, a sister project to DIVINFOOD. These 27 tools are included in the toolbox and presented one by one in this report. Overall, the comparative analysis shows that criteria relating to the use of biodiversity are only very partially incorporated into existing evaluation tools, which highlights the novelty and significance of the work carried out within DIVINFOOD on partners’ tools. Recommendations are set out at the end of the deliverable, based on the work carried out within DIVINFOOD, with a view to improving existing evaluation tools.