The growing concern for food safety and quality motivates governments and private sectors to improve consumers’ confidence in food systems, such as through adopting certifications and traceability systems. The recent emergence of diverse food labelling schemes and the turbulence in food systems in emerging countries have sparked questions about consumers’ valuation of such labels. Nonetheless, little is known on how the familiarity with, trust in and knowledge of these food labelling schemes affect consumers’ willingness to pay for labelling schemes in emerging market contexts. This study aims to address these literature gaps by investigating consumers’ valuation of existing certifications, branding and traceability labelling schemes in Vietnam. A face-to-face survey was conducted, including a discrete choice experiment on water spinach in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The findings indicated that Vietnamese consumers are generally willing to pay price premia for food labelling schemes, such as VietGAP certification, EU and USDA organic certifications, private branding and traceable Quick Response (QR) coding. While familiarity and understanding had no significant impact on Vietnamese consumers’ valuation, trust was found to be a critical factor shaping willingness to pay for products bearing VietGAP label. Policy implications and marketing strategies for organic certifications and traceability schemes in Vietnam are discussed.

The growing demand for traceable and reliable results in analytical chemistry can be illustrated with the growth in ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation. Among different technical requirements in this quality system, the use of CRMs is highlighted because of its applications in many operations, such as method validation, proficiency tests, estimation of the uncertainties and quality control.Over the past several years, there has been an increased need to use different types of CRMs in chemical analysis, new CRM publications about its developments and certification. This paper proposes to show a detailed review considering the development of certified reference materials (CRM) for chemical analysis, focusing on food, water, soil and sediment matrices. An evaluation of the trends and best-applied practices in its development in the last 2 years was performed, to guide new developments for this material that is increasingly necessary to laboratories.

In recent years, the agrifood sector has been relevantly impacted by resource shortage, food loss and waste across the whole supply chain. This study assesses, from a life cycle perspective, the water footprint of the fruit and vegetable losses occurring within the Italian agrifood supply chain, analyzing the potential linkages between circular economy policies and water management. The study methodology consists of three consequential steps: the definition of system boundaries, the data collection from databases and reports, and the processing of said data. Based on data availability of food losses, the following food items were chosen for the analysis, representing about 60% of the Italian fruits and vegetables domestic supply: tomatoes and onions for the macro-group of vegetables; orange, lemons, apples and grapes for the macro-group of fruits. Assessing the water footprint for the six categories of products, this study found out that, although less than other products, the amount of grapes lost along the supply chain determines a very high percentage of water loss. The tomato supply chain has proved to be the most sustainable in terms of water loss, due to the low amount of water needed to cultivate tomatoes. The analysis of the Italian trade market of fruits and vegetables has shown that water losses are mainly due to imports from France and Spain, in line with the high trade volumes. Finally, a weakness of the Italian fruit and vegetable supply chain was observed in the transport phase, because in this phase large quantities of food loss are associated with large volumes of water loss. Far from being the only tool to be used in the decision-making processes, the assessment of water loss embodied in the food loss, can be useful for managing the supply chain processes of perishable foods, ensuring process yield improvements, food quality traceability and environmental impact mitigation.