What this community must start, strengthen, or transform to drive change from within.

1. Champion Systemic Change and confront power inequities

Emphasise that lasting systemic change requires governments, businesses, financial institutions, and affluent communities to take responsibility for reshaping policies, subsidies, and corporate practices. While consumers should move towards healthier, sustainable diets, this shift becomes possible only when systemic reforms make such choices affordable, accessible, and appealing. As consumers and citizens, it is on us to expose the powerful interests that influence policy and create outcomes that are unjust, unhealthy, or unsustainable.  

2. Forge powerful partnerships for greater impact

Build bridges with a wider range of food systems actors to shape the urgent transition to healthy and sustainable diets for all. This includes partnering with local farmers, community centres, healthcare professionals, and influential media voices to promote positive narratives through trusted, locally relevant channels, ensuring marginalised groups and youth are included. Through coalition-building and community platforms, we can co-create solutions that link nutrition, climate, and biodiversity, driving cross-sector and intergenerational action. 

Story of Progress: Empowering Youth in Food Systems - Act4Food

3. Build new marketplace models, connecting consumers and farmers in local food networks

Take collective action to connect frontline food system actors while advancing fairer outcomes for all. Pilot, improve, and scale context-appropriate approaches that link local farmers and consumers, including consumer cooperatives, wet markets, digital platforms, community food hubs, and community-supported agriculture. Ensure these models  respond to the needs and preferences of marginalised groups and youth. 

Stories of Progress: ● Smart Grains, Stronger Children - Consumer VOICE ● GFM Kitchen - Ghana Food Movement

4. Strengthen traditional food systems and indigenous knowledge

Protect, promote, and revitalise traditional food systems that have sustained communities for generations. Document and share indigenous food knowledge, support traditional food producers and integrate ancestral dietary practices with modern nutrition science. This includes advocating for policies that protect indigenous seeds, land, and traditional farming methods.

Story of Progress: Reimagining Better Diets from the Ground Up - Tailored Food

5. Bring grassroots voices into food systems governance

Equip and empower consumers to engage in political processes, from elections to policy consultations and inclusive decision-making. Where possible given institutional and political environments, amplify and institutionalise consumers' voices, such as youth leadership (and others), in food-policy councils and citizens’ assemblies, with built-in accountability mechanisms. Where formal opportunities are more limited, mobilise popular movements.

Story of Progress: Centring People in Local Food Strategy- Centre for Food Policy

6. Promote policy actions that advance access to the Planetary Health Diet (PHD)

Advocate for inclusive and participatory policies and regulations, from local to global, that ensure access to healthy, sustainable diets, and prioritise those most vulnerable to malnutrition. Ground these actions in the recognition of the human right to adequate food. This fundamental right guarantees every person access to food in sufficient quantity and quality for a dignified and healthy life, and an essential guarantee for the exercise of other rights.

Stories of Progress: ● Closing the Gap between Food Supply and Healthy Diets - Centre for Food Policy ● Shaping the Shift to Plant-rich diets in China - Good Food Fund

7. Push for accountability and transparency from governments and businesses

Advocate, with public support, for social- and environmental-goal setting and tracking that is publicly set, transparently tracked, and reported on. Push for legal mandates to achieve these goals, supported by transparent, and inclusive governance to ensure that commitments are independently monitored and implemented. Push for rigorous enforcement of food-safety standards and marketing regulations and penalties that protect consumers, especially children, from manipulative and misleading promotion of unhealthy foods.

Story of Progress: Leveraging Approaches to Advance Healthy Food Policies in Ghana - INFORMAS

8. Pressure and engage with businesses to make healthy and sustainable diets the easy choice for consumers

Mobilise and signal consumer preferences for minimally processed, healthy, and affordable foods, while pressing and engaging with companies to shift product portfolios, reformulation, marketing, labeling, pricing, and availability. Monitor and call out irresponsible practices,  and identify areas that require the creation or enforcement of regulation.

Stories of Progress: ●Blended Food that Fits Everyday Habits - Consumetenbond  ● Front of Package Labeling Journey-Consumer Voice.

9. Tackle misinformation and tailor communication to diverse communities

Counter misinformation and the resulting confusion on complex topics such as plant-rich diets, processed foods, and local food economies. Tailor communication to different communities, both in terms of content, – addressing culturally-appropriate diets and differentiated responsibilities for dietary shift, – and in the approach, partnering with local media, fact-checking organisations, youth, and trusted voices to reach and engage a wider audience.

Actions currently undertaken by our community that hinder progress towards healthier, more sustainable, and more just food systems and should be stopped or done differently.

1. Stop siloed, top-down approaches to decision-making. 

Focus instead on inclusive grassroots efforts that connect farmers, healthcare professionals, policymakers, and consumers across socio-economic groups. Ensure policies reflect lived experiences, link climate, biodiversity, water, and food, and are backed by permanent, meaningful spaces for open dialogue where all voices are respected.

2. Stop placing responsibility on individual consumers to lead change. 

Emphasise that individual consumers cannot be expected to lead change alone, given systemic lock-ins such as entrenched power imbalances. Instead, i) highlight the responsibility of regulators, government and industry to reshape food environments making sustainable and nutritious options the easy choice, and ii) organise consumer action, utilising the collective consumer agency to shift norms and push institutions to act.

3. Stop using language and narratives that alienate or confuse consumers. 

Avoid using jargon and framing dietary shifts as an elite choice. Instead, frame dietary shifts in terms of health, affordability, and everyday-life benefits. Adopt inclusive and empowering language and translations into multiple languages that connect with people and their local contexts.

4. Stop shying away from demanding corporate accountability, transparency, and responsibility. 

Confront and push governments to make corporations recognise their global and local responsibility for unhealthy and unsustainable outcomes, mobilising accountability mechanisms for greater transparency. Also, work with corporations directly in an effort to co-create accountability and transparency measures without compromising just and sustainable outcomes.

Asks from this community to other communities that are necessary to overcome systemic barriers to action (“lock-ins”), pointing to opportunities for collaboration.

1. Policymakers:

a. Provide transparent, clear data and equitable access to information to educate consumers, fight misinformation, and

define who is responsible and accountable.

b. Leverage public food procurement (in schools, hospitals, public canteens) to normalise and create demand for healthy

and sustainable foods.

c. Regulate price, availability, and infrastructure to ensure access to healthy and sustainable foods.

d. Regulate against the production, promotion, and marketing of unhealthy foods (particularly for children) and de-

subsidise the import of cheap, processed foods.

e. Ensure food packaging and labelling are clear to consumers.

f. Recognise and support informal markets, street-food vendors and traditional food systems.

g. Ensure corporations are held accountable for the negative impacts of their activities on food systems.

h. Reduce special-interest influence on policy through transparency and lobbying/donation limits.

i. Ensure meaningful representation of diverse consumer profiles.

2. Farmers and fishers:

a. Collaborate directly with consumer groups and civil society organisations to build coalitions and co-create solutions that

generate or maintain demand for diverse, sustainable, healthy and indigenous foods, guarantee a just transition and

ensure equitable working conditions for farmers and fishers.

b. Promote direct-to-consumer models to reduce dependence on intermediaries and strengthen local food markets

through trustworthy, transparent practices and fair pricing.

3. Food Retailers and Manufacturers

a. Make healthy and sustainable choices more available, affordable and convenient than unhealthy foods, especially for

marginalised groups.

b. Reduce and stop the promotion of unsafe chemicals and unhealthy ultra-processed foods, particularly processed meat

and foods high in sugar, salt, and saturated fat.

c. Ensure fair pricing throughout supply chains, especially for smallholder farmers.

d. Prioritise procurement from local farmers and producers.

e. Be transparent in reporting, including on market share, sustainability targets, progress in improving food healthiness,

wages and working conditions.

4. Science and Academia

a. Integrate local people's perspectives and needs in research design and co-produce studies with community members as registered co-investigators. Communicate results in a more accessible way.

b. Conduct more policy-relevant and community-engaged research in a just way, ensuring representation from marginalised groups, recognising consumers as generators of knowledge

c. Recognise local priorities and inform research and policy development and action with relevant, credible evidence.

d. Engage with storytellers and journalists to improve knowledge mobilisation efforts and ensure the knowledge gap is bridged between consumers and science.

5. Health Care Professionals  

a. Raise awareness of the importance of adopting the PHD and of ensuring food security for all.

b. Shift the narrative in public-health campaigns from individual responsibility on patients to collective responsibility and

need for systemic change.

6. Financial Sector 

a. Redirect agricultural financing from industrial monocultures to diversified sustainable farming.

b. Provide accessible credit for consumer cooperatives and local food enterprises.

c. Stop financing industrial agriculture that displaces traditional food systems.

d. Support microfinance for marginalised groups, such as women farmers, youth, and food entrepreneurs.