Studying, comparing and discussing different social-economic and environmental impacts of innovative food chain systems in selected case studies is at the heart of the FOODMETRES approach. Though we use the current ecological footprint of urban food consumption (in global hectares) as a point of departure, we are ultimately interested in the concrete food chain innovation and land use potentials of the surrounding metropolitan regions in terms of the available ´local hectares´. Spreading the case studies over five EU regions and one developing country allows us to not only compare internal food market regimes, but to also analyse different dimensions of global trade in terms of resource management, logistics, food safety and other issues. In each of the case studies we study the food chain performance of up to 8 commodities (some of them common – e.g. dairy products, others only regional – e.g. asparagus), making use of sustainability criteria such as energy, labour, resource efficiency, seasonality, biodiversity, water protection, pesticide use, etc.). The six selected case study cities are: Rotterdam (The Netherlands), Berlin (Germany), Ljubljana (Slovenia), London (United Kingdom), Milan (Italy), Nairobi (Kenia)