Amsterdam's food strategy aims to make healthy, sustainable, and affordable food accessible to all residents while cutting food waste in half by 2030, supporting urban farming, shorter supply chains, and innovative entrepreneurs to build a more circular and equitable food system.
AMS Institute explores farming on floating islands, how well-placed community fridges make a difference, and the organization of food systems around intimate kitchen tables.
This article was featured in the AMS Impact Digest 2025-2026
The smart community fridge
What if a single fridge could fight both food waste and food insecurity at once? AMS Institute researcher Joe Llewellyn, Buurtbuik and MIT's Senseable City Lab tested exactly that by placing a smart, sensor-equipped community fridge beside the Jordaan community center Het Claverhuis for 30 days. The result: 1,465 kg of food saved from waste, worth €13,291, donated daily by a local organic supermarket. Crucially, 35% of fridge users polled said they experienced mild to severe food insecurity. According to the Amsterdam food strategy, nearly one in four Amsterdammers regularly cannot afford a healthy meal, rising to almost 60% among low-income residents. The research shows that simple, community-rooted interventions can address the gap between Amsterdam's food abundance and its food poverty.
Read more about the Buurtfridge here.
The Smart Community Fridge
Floating Deltas: Growing food on water
Floating Deltas, an AMS Institute and Wageningen University & Research project, tests whether food can be grown on floating islands in water-rich, low-lying urban deltas such as cities threatened by flooding, soil subsidence, and extreme weather. The project explores cultivation systems, economics, and consumer acceptance.
Integrating it all into a working prototype has presented many surprises so far, and the waters have not always been smooth. For example, Floating Deltas project leader and researcher at WUR, Arjan Dekking, and the consortium had their sights set on two testing locations. The Amsterdam Living Lab was intended for waters near AMS Institute, in the heart of Amsterdam. But safety concerns, competing experiments, and worries about disturbing biodiversity at the proposed waterside location ruled it out.
"At first I was a little bit frustrated," Dekking admits. But the setback forced a pivot to Almere, where the project now runs its living lab on Dekking's home turf. "It is always nice to do a project in your own neighborhood." A second Amsterdam location, he now believes, would have been too much to manage alongside the technical complexity of building an entirely new prototype from scratch.
Floating Deltas moved ahead with its Almere Living Lab. It proved successful, witnessing the first harvest in May 2026 with a healthy crop of 2,000 bok choy. The island rises and falls with water levels and requires no land.
Another success is the project's innovation agenda and roadmap for floating crops, to guide other communities on whether floating crops should be introduced, what a floating greenhouse can look like and how it relates to consumers. It discusses who can play a role (government, water boards, business and research) and under which conditions (policy, regulations, market & consumer), along with viewpoints on the international perspective of floating crops.
The project's island sits at Technology Readiness Level 4: proof of principle achieved, and the consortium includes businesses that can bring the devices to market.
Floating food production would not compete on price with the Netherlands' large-scale, low-cost agriculture. But for Caribbean islands dependent on food imports, megacities like Singapore or Hong Kong, or flood-prone deltas in Bangladesh or Vietnam, the equation looks very different.
"As climate change threatens coastal cities with flooding, soil subsidence and extreme weather, floating farms offer a radical rethink of where food can grow. Developing a floating greenhouse has definitely been one of the highlights of this year for me," said Bart Kuiter, AMS Institute Metropolitan Food Systems lead.
Floating deltas is one idea for sustainable and locally-embedded food production, particularly through their potential for resource efficiency, climate adaptation, and multifunctional use.
Running through 2028, the project will investigate other functions of floating deltas and challenges around technical feasibility, operational organization, and policy frameworks to support future development and large-scale deployment. Upon overcoming those hurdles, such a modular and adaptable design might one day feed water-scarce, saline, and climate-vulnerable environments around the world.
Women on Food
A pot of lentil soup simmers on the stove. Grape leaves, stuffed and fragrant, are arranged on a platter. Someone has brought sopropo, alongside Madame Jeanette peppers and a bunch of Moroccan mint. Pull up a chair, grab a plate, and hear from the women who started a movement called Women on Food, which officially launched as a foundation in December 2025. Their mission is to give greater visibility to the knowledge, experience, and contributions of women in food systems, and to help strengthen their role in the transition to a more sustainable food future.
Antonia Weiss (Women on Food Co-Founder and Research Fellow at AMS Institute): Amsterdam is one of the most food-diverse cities in the world, and yet we keep looking elsewhere for solutions for healthy and affordable food. The knowledge we need is already here. It's in the community gardens of Nieuw-West, in the kitchens of Zuidoost, and served at tables everywhere in between.
Rosamunde Dors (Women on Food Advisor & Project Manager, City of Amsterdam Inclusion & Diversity): That's exactly why Women on Food has to sit between the policymakers and the community. Not translating one for the other, actually bridging them. Women on Food now has a direct relationship with Amsterdam's food strategy department, and there is genuine commitment and understanding that working with this group helps to address blind spots.
Antonia: From the perspective of Women on Food, we are particularly concerned about two blind spots in current food policy. First: food culture within migrant and diasporic communities. Second: gender. Who actually does the daily food work in this city? It's women. It's not biology, it's how we organize society. And when policymakers talk about "shifting consumer behavior," they're largely talking about shifting women's behavior. Women who are already carrying enormous responsibility, much of it unpaid.
Nadia Zerouali (Women on Food Co-Founder, Cookbook author): I saw it clearly at our launch. Over 120 women, each working to change the food system through cooking, growing, running businesses, organizing community kitchens. So much knowledge. So much energy. And almost none of it is recognized in policy circles, until now.
Antonia: Our role as an accelerator and thought leader is really twofold. One: we surface knowledge that's already present but invisible: eating a more plant-based diet, avoiding food waste, growing your own food, medicinal uses of food. We're asking: how do we create conditions where people can fully use the knowledge they already have? Two: we hold policymakers accountable to inclusion. A sustainable food system that only benefits affluent neighborhoods isn't a just transition.
Foto by Bloomingmoonstudio
Amsterdam's food strategy sets an ambitious target: 60% plant-based proteins in the city's diet by 2030, with a healthier, fairer food system for all. While nearly tens of thousands of households live in poverty, the benefits of the city's food transition disproportionately reach its wealthier neighborhoods. Women on Food bridges this gap: connecting the City's sustainability goals to the lived expertise of the women already feeding Amsterdam, ensuring the food transition is built with the community, not just for it.
