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Data driven collaboration between industry & health professionals

Published on
September 30, 2021

What does the consumer need to make the healthy and sustainable choice the easy choice? What do industry and health professionals need to make this happen? How can data support these needs? Let’s discuss these topics in our workshop at the Conference Personalised Nutrition & health (oct 7), because industry and science need each other to bring the use of data in personalised nutrition for consumers to the next level.

Marielle Timmer, senior researcher food informatics, Wageningen University & Research (WUR)

A transition towards healthy and sustainable diets is needed in order to benefit the environment and our health. This requires new products and processes in the food industry as well as changed consumer behaviour to make healthy and sustainable choices the easiest ones. With new, reformulated products and recipes with less sugar and fat, applying new processes to produce and market these products, the industry can assist the consumer in eating more healthy and sustainable. Both, producers and consumers need decision making support to combine and evaluate the available data and choose products and ingredients that suit their goals and preferences.

Predicting implications

Digital technology is a key enabler for realizing this change, in particular since the change requires decision making of all involved stakeholders, such as industry, retail, non-profit organisations and consumers. Decision making relies on predicting the implications of alternative dietary scenarios, based on all possibly relevant data and knowledge. Easy digital access to reliable food product and ingredient information from a large variety of sources, enriched with scientific knowledge on the impact of food on environment and public health will change this field in a revolutionary way.

Starting from consumers perspective

Food Informatic experts from Wageningen Food & Biobased Research, one of the institutes within WUR, digitalize the data and knowledge in the domains of food ingredients, consumer behaviour and health, and supply chain sustainability. We combine data from a diversity of sources and transform expert knowledge into services. These services can be used in collaborations between industry and health professionals.

As each collaboration starts with the need of the consumer, we start our workshop from the consumers perspective: what is important for the consumer? From there we continue with the question what industry and health professionals need. With these insights we can improve the data and make it available for all kind of collaborations.

Want learn more? Please join the discussion in our workshop ‘Data driven collaboration between industry & health professionals’ at the Conference Personalised Nutrition & Health at 7 October 2021.