Sustainable food production is how to provide healthy food to meet human needs while maintaining healthy ecosystems that can continue to provide food for generations with minimal negative impact to the environment. This is achieved by the development of production systems that can combine high productivity with an efficient use of resources, minimal losses of waste and minimal impact on biodiversity in natural ecosystems.

Sustainable food production is often based on new technologies and improved use of ecosystem services. The sustainability of food production can be analyzed by making life cycle analysis of the food products. Sustainable food production concerns both plant and animal foods, organic and conventional systems as well as the agricultural and agrifood processing industry.

Research on sustainable plant food production is focused on:

• Cultivars, new crops and fertility building crops that are robust, resource efficient and high yielding
• Low-input cropping systems based on recycling and efficient use of nutrients, water, pesticides and energy.
• Storage, packaging and processing technologies based on reduced use of resources
• New technologies and alternative solutions for reduction of waste in the whole chain