Driving the Digital and Sustainable Transition Through Law: Assessing the Food Consumer’s Legal Toolkit

With the Farm to Fork Strategy on the one hand and the Digital Services Act package on the other, the European Union is in the process of drafting a new policy framework on both food systems and the digital economy. In fact, organic to the European Green Deal is the need to align the entire food chain to sustainability criteria, and the Farm to Fork Strategy action plan includes a proposal for a legislative framework for sustainable food systems. In parallel, the adoption of new acts governing e-commerce shows the need for bringing fair practices in the growing economic sector of the digital and sharing economy. Stemming from an analysis of the structural characteristic of different food platforms, the chapter aims at collocating the phenomenon into the wider EU regulatory and policy picture. The chapter adopts a food consumer-centred perspective and interrogates the EU legal framework to clarify what are the instruments granted by the law to citizens for fulfilling their food-related rights, needs and choices while navigating the digital market. The study will first give an account of the most recent advancements in EU food law for the promotion of the healthiness of diets, then it will focus on the growing attention by EU institutions to the protection of non-health-related considerations, and thirdly the analysis will delve into the so-called digital consumers’ rights, i.e. rights recognized by EU law to consumers when they use digital services. The chapter offers a synthetic assessment of the current challenges and future directions in the food legal environment.