Importance of action labs to transform the agri-food system towards sustainability

The agri-food system is increasingly under pressure due to demographic, economic and environ-mental changes. Moreover, internal trends such as consolidation and private standards also affect the system. As a result, the agri-food system is urged to make a transition towards sustainability. Many sus-tainability experiments arise to respond to these trends. An important aspect to facilitate this trans-formation is to gain insight in these experiments. We define them as action labs as they are practice-oriented and in an experimental phase. The aim of this paper is to explore the process of collaboration within these action labs and with the mainstream agri-food system. We analyse four case studies to analyse how action labs could contribute to the sus-tainability challenges of the mainstream agri-food system. The results highlight 13 key factors of collab-oration and link the performance of the experimental initiatives with the structure of the actor network and interaction to the agri-food system.1Our research contributes to enhancing scientific knowledge on the role of collaboration in the transformation of agri-food systems.