• core consortium, an
• extended consortium and an
• advisory board.

Members of the core consortium take direct responsibility of workpackages. The extended consortium contributes to tasks within workpackages (see paragraph 6, project management structure for more information). The advisory board consists of SMEs and business associations from the food sector and is a link to SMEs from the food sector.

The composition of the core and extended consortium is a trans-national European network with international participation and was chosen to include

• excellence,
• competence and
• experience at European level in the food chain quality management and tracking and tracing

required in the e-Trust project as well as expertise about food chains in different European countries. The EU partners from Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Greece, The Netherlands, and Slovenia represent a variety of European food sectors and the most important European food producers.

Due to the fact that the EU is the world’s leading exporter (62 billion euro in 2002) and the world’s leading importer (61 billion euro in 2002) of food, international cooperation is of uttermost importance for the e-Trust project dealing with the uptake of new e-commerce technologies for cost-efficient processes along the food chain. The US is one of the largest suppliers of food to Europe. A partner from the US was therefore chosen as it is essential to study improvement potentials of the import processes of US food to secure the affordability of high quality food for European consumers (see APPENDIX A for more detailed information).

For the realization of this ambitious project, it is essential to perform similar tasks in different European countries regarding trust elements in different food chains. The complementarity of the partners lies in the contribution of

• different combinations of areas of expertise and methodical knowledge from both food safety / food quality / food chain management plus ICT / e-commerce:
  • food quality and food safety management (tracking and tracing, ISO 9000, HACCP),
  • trust in the food chain with regard to different cultures,
  • food chain management,
  • food marketing and food consumers,
  • the Analytical Hierarchy Process to support the analysis activities,
  • e-commerce in the food sector and ICT usability engineering,
  • process management and process organisation in the food sector;
• particular knowledge about the local food chains in the respective European country and associated countries (Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Greece, Slovenia, Turkey) and the language to conduct expert interviews and to disseminate the results to food sector SMEs.

The analyses and studies activities (WPs 3-7; see paragraph 7) will perform actions, which were never tried before and which are of extreme importance to facilitate the uptake of ecommerce technologies in food chains for increased and sustainable competitiveness of the European food sector and the well-being of European consumers. These activities require substantial resources. A part of them will be provided by the consortium partners, the other part is requested in this project to be provided by the EU. In addition, the internal project communication (WP2) to set up the European expert network and in particular the communication with stakeholders for dissemination of the project’s results to secure the project’s impact on the well-being of European consumers and the competitiveness of the European food sector (WP8) require substantial resources and support from the EU.

All academic consortium members have a focus on food quality / food safety management research and food sector ICT management research for companies in the food sector and extensive experience in collaborating with SMEs from the food sector.

To fulfil the project’s objectives, intense communication and interaction between the consortium members is essential (see also paragraphs 6 and 7 for detailed information about the project communication and project networking). This is supported by the fact that most members have already been collaborating on different former projects and on different levels of collaboration. All consortium members have videoconference equipment on different levels of sophistication.

The fulfilment of the project’s objectives is supported by an advisory board consisting of SMEs as well as industry associations representing the majorities of the local food sectors from the respective member countries. All members of the advisory board have expressed their high interest in participating in the project. Industry associations are business representatives of the food sector. The associations in the advisory board act as intermediaries to provide links for the interaction with SMEs from different European food chains to multiply the results.