Future Food Court Workshops: Exploring Finnish Stakeholder Engagement for Sustainable 2040 Food Systems

The global food system makes a significant contribution to climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, water extraction, and pollution, with all stages in the supply chain—from agricultural production through processing, distribution, retailing, and home food preparation—playing a part [5]. This paper summarizes the context and key objectives of the Future Food Court Workshops, which aimed to engage diverse stakeholders in discussions on how to transform the Finnish food system toward a more sustainable one by 2040. The first challenging aim was to develop an interdisciplinary framework that integrated environmental, foresight, social, and service design approaches for the research. The second challenge was the research objective: how to organize Future Food Court Workshops that co-envisioned the food ecosystem transitions toward 2040. This included finding suitable technologies, e.g., bioreactor-based, locally grown food products and value-sensitive protein alternatives, and the visual and tangible presentations of the examples. The third challenge was the future-oriented analysis of the results: how to interpret the engagement of stakeholders—including representatives from industry, the public sector, third-sector organizations, educational institutions, and individual consumers—and the deeper understanding of how they conceptualized the sustainability challenges in the food ecosystem.