An increasing amount of cities are invested in developing innovative policies to make the food system more sustainable. This article investigates whether combinations of governance practices can explain why some of these cities develop highly innovative food policies across multiple dimensions of the food system – such as health and waste – while others are only limited in their innovativeness. Therefore, we apply fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to identify combinations of necessary and sufficient governance conditions to explain food system innovativeness across 26 European cities participating in the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact. Results show that the absence of specific practices, such as mapping local food initiatives, food-related government integration, developing integrated food strategies and monitoring and evaluation, prevents cities from being more innovative.