The Territorial Food Strategies (tfs), in French « Projets Alimentaires Territoriaux (PAT) », is a French initiative defined in the French ‘Future of agriculture, food and forest law’ from 13th October 2014. They answer the stakes of the national food program and the objectives of sustainable agriculture’s regional layouts. Sharing viewpoints with territorialized agriculture, their goal is to develop sustainable agriculture and food quality on these territories in order to contribute to the consolidation of territorialized industries and build a territorialized food system thought around the economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainable development.

The goal of tfs is to unite and federate different players of a territory, in order to build a strategy around food and its impacts. The planning can regroup producers, development agencies, local authorities, companies and cooperatives, members of society and of social economy, scientists, etc. The leaders are generally local authorities and their goals are based on a shared diagnosis of agriculture and territorial nutrition.

The national network of tfs distinguishes two types of tfs: those whose goal is built around the support of a production and local industries answering the territorial food demand and those whose objective considers different food and nutrition dimensions. Furthermore, these tfs must integrate the goals of the French law ‘EGALIM’ from 2018 on canteen supplying, fight against food waste and for food justice. In 2014, the Ministry of Agriculture set a goal of 500 validated Territorial Food Strategies for 2020. As such, this tool can allow the spread of agroecological transition on a territorial scale.

In an international context of food urban policy implementing, urban authorities were first to use this tool, as the international initiative of Milan Urban Food Policy Pact from 2015 shows.