On November 19, 2025, the European Commission has adopted the 2030 Consumer Agenda, a strategic plan for EU consumer policy for the next five years. The Agenda sets out five priority areas: (1) completing the single market; (2) digital fairness and consumer protection online; (3) sustainable consumption; (4) effective enforcement and redress; and (5) Governance and stakeholder cooperation.
Building on the Consumer Agenda of 2020 and inspired by the Letta Report’s message that a strong Single Market needs robust consumer protection to stay competitive, innovative and fair, the new Agenda sets the strategic direction for EU consumer policy until 2030. It recognises consumers as key drivers of green and digital transitions, at a time when the cost of living and rapid changes in online markets are reshaping behaviour. From the consumers’ organisation perspective, the transition to sustainable and climate-smart agriculture (CSA) will only be successful if food remains affordable, diets become healthier and public spending is transparent and outcome-oriented. Consumer organisations stress that all consumer should have access to diets that are both healthy and sustainable, with fair food prices that support and reward environmentally responsible production as well as high animal welfare standards. Yet, the EU’s 2025 Vision for Agriculture and Food does not sufficiently enable these ambitions, as it lacks a clear commitment to consumer affordability, measurable nutritional outcomes, and the stronger inclusion of consumer perspectives in agricultural governance.
A first pillar is better evidence on how consumers are coping and choosing. By the end of 2026, the Commission will strengthen the monitoring and analysis of consumer conditions and trends – including the cost of living – building on the Consumer Conditions Scoreboard.
A second key lever is the Directive on empowering consumers for the green transition. Recently adopted, it introduces harmonised notices on the legal guarantee of conformity and a harmonised label for commercial guarantees of durability, to be rolled out across the Single Market from 2025 onwards.
The Agenda also responds to the findings of the Digital Fairness Fitness Check, which identified significant gaps in the protection afforded by EU consumer law in online environments. These gaps include the prevalence of dark patterns, addictive designs features, and opaque personalisation practices. To address these shortcomings, To address these shortcomings, the Commission plans follow-up measures, including a future Digital Fairness Act, aimed at closing these gaps, reducing legal uncertainty for businesses, and avoiding regulatory fragmentation.
Finally, governance and participation are central. The Commission’s intention to regularly convene a Ministerial Forum on Consumer Protection and to organise a Youth Policy Dialogue on consumer policy in 2026 creates formal spaces where consumer, sustainability and competitiveness agendas meet. Once again, democratic legitimacy and trust are essential for the CAP to maintain public support. Consumers want to know how public money is spent, who benefits, and whether policy outcomes meet their demands. However, the adopted Consumer Agenda 2030 suffers from a glaring lack of consumer representation in CAP nationoal monitoring committees, which remain dominated by agricultural and governmental actors. Consumers should have a regular seat at the table when decisions about the CAP are made, not just be included occasionally.
In this new policy landscape, BEATLES can act as a bridge between the 2030 Consumer Agenda and the realities of European farms and food systems. The project focuses on behavioural analysis to foster the transition to fair, healthy and environmentally friendly food systems and the adoption of CSA and smart farming technologies. By aligning behavioural insights with stronger consumer rights, better data on living conditions, clearer green information and fairer digital markets, the project can help ensure that climate-smart choices are not only technically feasible, but also attractive, affordable and trustworthy for Europe’s 450 million consumers and the farmers who feed them. The project’s behavioural research can also help policymakers understand how affordability pressures shape consumer food choices — an issue BEUC highlights as essential for a fair transition. Integrating affordability indicators into food-system monitoring will be key to ensuring that climate-smart production does not end up making healthy food less accessible for households.
Project partners such as ZPS (Slovene Consumers’ Association) and AEIDL (European Association for Innovation in Local) are well positioned to translate the 2030 Consumer Agenda into concrete, community-level recommendations. Their role is essential in understanding behavioural barriers, identifying opportunities to improve public support, and shaping incentives that encourage both sustainable consumption and CSA adoption.
In light of these developments, the recommendations below highlight key actions to strengthen public support for CSA while empowering consumers in the transition to sustainable food systems:
Integrate consumer behaviour insights into CSA incentive design
Build public support schemes that reflect real consumer choices and constraints, drawing on the EU’s strengthened monitoring of consumer conditions and behavioural evidence. This approach help ensure that CSA practices remain attractive, affordable, and trusted by both farmers and consumers. Consumer organisations also emphasize that sustainable agriculture must contribute to greater biodiversity and reduced use of antibiotics and pesticides, among other measurable factors. Behavioural insights from the BEATLES project can support the design of incentives tailored to achieve the proposed aims.
Strengthen transparency and trust through harmonised sustainability information
Promote the use of harmonised durability labels, green information rules, digital product passports, and clear sustainability claims to support climate-friendly food choices and CSA-compliant products.
Support circular and repair-oriented agricultural value chains
Encourage CSA by supporting repair, reuse, and resource-efficient models in farm equipment and food systems—linked to the EU’s right-to-repair, circular economy measures, and ecodesign requirements.
Ensure digital fairness in smart farming technologies
Align public support for smart farming tools with the Digital Fairness Act and AI Act to protect farmers as digital consumers, ensuring transparent, safe, and interoperable digital tools that reduce risk and build trust. Liability, transparent algorithms, and rights over farm data are essential to ensuring trust in smart farming.
Strengthen consumer–farmer linkages for sustainable food systems
Promote mechanisms that connect the 2030 Consumer Agenda with CSA adoption (e.g., local initiatives, labels, community-based pilots), supported by grassroots consumer organisations and behavioural research to increase uptake of climate-smart foods and farming practices.
Healthy Diets
Consumers expect the CAP to foster healthier diets and ensure that nutritious and tasty food is accessible to everyone. With the environmental crisis worsening and diet-related diseases on the rise, it is increasingly unacceptable that many countries still allow and even use public funds to support the promotion of foods known to harm both human health and the environment. A climate-smart food system must deliver the benefits that matter most to consumers: affordable healthy food, transparent public spending, meaningful participation, and measurable environmental improvements. To succeed, the transition must place consumers’ dietary need, wants, and realities at the centre, not treat them as an afterthought.
Author: Blanca Casares (AEIDL) and Jasmina Bevc (ZPS)
