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FOLOU Twinning Regions: two-day in-person workshop in Barcelona advances food-loss prevention work 

12/11/2025

Barcelona — 4–5 November 2025.  

On Tuesday 4 and Wednesday 5 November an in-person workshop took place in Barcelona to continue the replication of FOLOU tools and methods to prevent food loss in primary production in different EU regions, with participants from six Twinning Regions and representatives from the FOLOU project. 

The two-day programme combined field testing, technical demonstrations and policy exchanges. Participants practised measurement techniques at the Parc Agrari del Baix Llobregat and took part in a gleaning social activity; they also explored FOLOU’s principal outcomes: FOLOU’s FL registry and Repository, drone-based measurement approaches, research and ongoing studies to identify food-loss drivers, and procedures to assess the social, economic and environmental impacts of food loss as well as the impacts of prevention — all designed to support regions that are validating and applying FOLOU’s outcomes and specifically integrating FL in their policy frameworks. 

The workshop is part of the FOLOU Twinning Regions Programme (TWRP), launched earlier in 2025 to help regional authorities, research institutes and farmer organisations to raise awareness and prompt action for food losses quantification and prevention, and to test and replicate FOLOU outputs across Europe. The TWRP brings technical support, peer learning and certified training for the participating regions so they can start work on the prevention of FL — awareness raising, defining, quantifying and assessing food losses in their territories. 

Catalonia’s Department of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Food (DARPA) hosted and welcomed the group, underlining Catalonia’s long-standing commitment to food-loss prevention. The department shared insights from Catalonia’s regulatory and subsidy framework (including a comparison between the regional and national policy frameworks on FLW) as a frontrunner region, and offered its support to Twinning Regions seeking to replicate regional and national prevention actions. 

Espigoladors Foundation hosted the second day of the workshop at their facilities in El Prat de Llobregat. The day started with a practical field activity to showcase how to measure and quantify food losses in an apple orchard. The quantification involved classifying the different apples left in the field according to the FOLOU methodology and definitional framework. Participants were able to understand and test how an on-farm food-loss measurement should be carried out and how to apply FOLOU’s definitional framework on food loss. 

The workshop closed with practical next steps: each Twinning Region will continue to implement priority actions over the coming months, testing FOLOU tools (the Food Loss Registry, Sustainability Tool and quantification manual), conducting on-site food-loss measurements and validating the Food Loss Definitional Framework and the methodology to quantify food losses in primary production. They will also conduct and share the different learning courses and training material offered by the project. The TWRP will continue to provide group and plenary peer-learning sessions through 2026. They will also be invited to participate in the upcoming national stakeholder workshops (focused on the validation of the FL recommendations), organized outside the TWRP framework, to continue building synergies and joining forces towards a more sustainable future.

Find out more about the Twinning Regions on our website here.