EUTA’s team leader Prof Steve Quarrie presented our activities and progress we made during first year of Strength2Food project on 2nd annual meeting in Barcelona, Spain. Steve focused on our role in WP 9.1.1 which is improvement of the nutritional and gastronomic qualities of school meals and WP 9.5.1, stimulating local farmer’s cooperation for school meals procurement in Serbia.

Biggest attention and most of our discussion was focused on the provision of educational resources by other partners and the Barilla’s first visit to schools in Serbia.

Representatives of BARILLA (Barilla Group), EUFIC (European Food Information Council), ZAG (University of Zagreb) and BEL (Faculty of Economics in Belgrade) contributed to ideas and suggestions for educational resources. Partners agreed to exchange educational information to identify a single set of resources to target different stakeholder groups: children (through teachers), parents, teachers, kitchen staff, policy makers.

It was agreed that Barilla representatives will come to Serbia in November this year for the initial meeting to assess the reality in schools – meals preparation, kitchen resources and potential challenges to introducing new menus and the visit to demonstrate cooking nutritious meals will be organized in 2018.

EUTA, BEL and MPN (Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development in Serbia) will continue school visits and will start working closely with schools to get their agreement to take part in the project’s activities. We will continue to identify and assess potential alternative local suppliers in the four target regions, targeting mainly cooperatives and individual farmers.