Collaboration opportunities

Title: School meal for the future - For everybody or for someone?

The debate on school meals in Denmark is very dynamic and active at the moment. But how should future-proof school meal arrangements be organised in the municipalities? Should it be free and universal, or should it be financed through parents’ payments? The idea of the current project is to look at the experiences of parent-paid lunch arrangements in daycare. This system is applied in around 45% of Danish kindergartens and provides a lot of useful insights on the payment part. We have access to a huge data set on the administration, including the payment arrangements from this in about 2000 Danish kindergartens.

Relevance:  This project study will give you new insight into how both qualitative and quantitative data, can be used to make conclusions relevant and frame questions about future school meals.

Paid or voluntary opportunity: Voluntary/nonpaid
Time period: Fall 2024
Contact information: Bent Egberg Mikkelsen, Professor, Urban Food Systems Transformation, IGN, bemi@ign.ku.dk
More information: 

Title: Governance of Food waste an important part of urban food strategies?

Increasingly, municipalities and cities around the world engage in governance and strategy-making in the food systems area. Urban planning has for a long time been covering topics such as national mobility and public health.  The new thing is, that they are now increasingly engaged in planning for future food systems in the city region, urban food strategies engaged in regulating public procurement, urban gardening, plant food-based strategies, and food waste reduction. This project is about the latter. We have access to a so-called city interest group within the framework of the EU Chorizo project. The idea is to collect data on how different cities go about planning for food waste reductions, how they achieve their goals, what the outcomes are, and how success can be monitored.

Relevance: This project would give you a good insight into the dynamics of urban food planning, the use of the multi-actor approach (MAA), and the Nordic partnership model. How can the city regulate an important topic without necessarily engaging in lawmaking but based on voluntary approaches?

Paid or voluntary opportunity: Voluntary/nonpaid
Time period: Fall 2024
Contact information: Bent Egberg Mikkelsen, Professor, Urban Food Systems Transformation, IGN, bemi@ign.ku.dk
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Title: Big food waste - Big data

“If you can measure it, you can counteract it.” That is the reasoning behind the idea of digitally assisted data collection of food waste data. Food waste monitoring is obligatory in the 27 EU member states. This means that all countries are supposed to collect data on amounts. Here, digitally semi-automated approaches have been spreading, particularly in Denmark, and small startup enterprises have developed a range of spot devices. In this project, we have access to datasets that are collected automatically from buffets at canteens. The challenge is to analyse those data and find relevant patterns. It will be based partly on machine learning.

Relevance: For those interested in large data sets and quantitative approaches, this is a unique opportunity to examine patterns, make cross-tabulations, and analyse correlations. If you are interested in big data insights and the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, this project is highly relevant to you.

Paid or voluntary opportunity: Voluntary/nonpaid
Time period: Fall 2024
Contact information: Bent Egberg Mikkelsen, Professor, Urban Food Systems Transformation, IGN, bemi@ign.ku.dk
More information: