According to some European projects, governmental trust would help to encourage people to continue eating fresh products. This conclusion was revealed among others at the recent Nutrevent conference held in France, where A variety of innovative approaches concerning the food were presented. Other project presented there found that people are highly concerned about the recent outbreak of the deadly enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) bacteria. In addition, the experts who met at the conference noted that nutritionists must pay particular attention to functional food innovations with natural compounds to help meet the growing concerns consumers have over healthy food.

Among the participants at the conference, scientists from Ghent University in Belgium presented the conclusions of the VEG-I-TRADE project. They found that people are highly concerned about the recent outbreak of the deadly enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) bacteria, but governmental trust helps ease their fears and encourages people to continue eating fresh produce. The communication about what triggered the EHEC bacteria could significantly impact how people purchase and consume fresh produce.

Another participant was the AFRESH project, which is establishing a research agenda for reducing diet- and physical inactivity-related diseases by developing innovative products to give sufferers the help they need. AFRESH is part of the Food Cluster Initiative that aims to strengthen the EU food research area, and to boost the EU's competitive advantage. Furthermore, the FOODRISC project points out that food communication must strike a balance between benefit claims, risk alertness and general consumer information. FOODRISC is working to offer consumers the right information they need about food/risk benefit relationships. All of these projects are funded budget line of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

In connection with food security, the Agriculture Committee has recently voted the amended draft labelling rules to cut the time taken to register a label, empower producers to do more to protect their products and allow a new label for mountain produce. The proposed new legislation on quality labelling for agricultural products would provide a single set of rules for quality labelling schemes for foods that originated in a given geographical area or were produced or processed in line with a traditional practice.