2 million NOK in EU support when Nordic Choice Hotels participates in projects to investigate how social norms affect food waste.

Within the EU project CHORIZO, various projects are carried out to obtain information and data about guests' behavior with the aim of reducing food waste in hotels. By systematizing and making available the results from the study, the ambition is to be able to contribute to a reduced climate impact on a large scale together with other players in the industry.

The project is a large EU project with 13 other actors, where Norce in Norway is a national partner. Innovasjon Norge was the driving force for involving Nordic Choice Hotels in the project. Both actors are key players in order for Nordic Choice Hotels to succeed with the project together. Together, the actors will implement several different projects where guests' behavior is looked at in order to reduce food waste, among other things they want to reduce the amount of waste at the breakfast buffet by informing how much food is thrown away and switching to lunch plates instead of buffets at conference lunches.

- Working with two professional partners is very valuable to us. Innovasjon Norge's role has been to open doors and initiate the project, as well as support us with practical things along the way. The collaboration with Norce will materialize further in the future and works very well. They operate at an intersection between research and business, which is very exciting, says Harald Bjugstad-Holm, Sustainability Director at Nordic Choice Hotels.

Norce represents the scientific side of the project, one of several world-leading institutes in this project. They support Nordic Choice Hotels with methodological work and documentation, so that practice becomes science. They also use modeling as a method to test hypotheses before testing them in real life.

- The CHORIZO project is a good example of how the latest developments in computational science can help key stakeholders like Nordic Choice Hotels create a positive impact in their daily lives. Social simulation tools are not very popular in Norway alone, but have great potential for guiding the discovery of context-adapted, sustainable solutions that can be implemented in real life, says Dr. Patrycja Antosz – Research leader of the Center for Modeling Social Systems.

Innovasjon Norge's role in this project reflects one of the organisation's main tasks, to help Norwegian business and research to take part in the EU's research programme.

- Congratulations to Choice for EU funding and success in the world's largest program for research and innovation, Horizon Europe. It will be exciting to follow their project, especially when we know that about a third of the food produced in the world is destroyed or thrown away. Innovation Norway greatly appreciates that Nordic Choice Hotels shows the possibilities for Norwegian business in Horizon Europe, says Håkon Haugli, CEO of Innovation Norway.

The project is carried out over 36 months and Nordic Choice Hotels has the main part of the delivery in 2023. This is the first time that Nordic Choice Hotels participates in a major EU research project.