
Nutritious by Design: Incorporating Healthy Choices at the core of Food Product Development
To truly enable healthier food choices, we need to work together with the food industry to conceptualize new methods upon which a food’s impact on health becomes part of its core identity and not a secondary characteristic.
Nutritious by Design, presents a groundbreaking initiative dedicated to integrating the principles of healthy food choices in the New Product Development process (NPD), with a primary goal of incorporating metrics and targets relevant to a food’s impact on diet and health in all key stages of NPD. The Nutritious by Design framework could be applied both in New Product Development as well as the reformulation of existing products following the same principles and processes.
The AUA, NUTRIS and DELTA SA will work together to collect and analyse food data and expert views to develop an NPD based framework for product development with nutrition as a core pillar. The Nutritious by Design framework will be pilot tested in ongoing projects, while trainings and hackathons will be provided for SMEs and other food producers to familiarise themselves with the methodology and promote its application.
Through Nutritious by Design, we envisage a shift in the mentality of designing healthier products. A new era where innovation to promote healthier choices is realized as a core business goal for the food industry with arguments supported by real-life examples. This initiative will not only contribute with new and reformulated products, but it will also test the capacity to create infrastructures dedicated to stewardship and support for the food sector in their transformative journey.
Nutritious by Design will be implemented in Greece and pilot tested with SMEs and stakeholders across Europe to allow for it to become an internationally relevant NPD framework. Nutritious by Design will promote the expansion of food databases and their utilization by the food industry, with a focus on SMEs and young professionals. The databases and NPD process will create business and research opportunities in South Europe and beyond while offering state-of-the-art training to SMEs and young professionals.
In Nutritious by Design, academia, research and the food industry join forces to:
- collect and analyse data which provide an actionable description of healthiness in processed foods
-design and pilot a new data driven framework for product development
- train and familiarise food producers on the new product development framework
- communicate to stakeholders the impact of the framework on healthier lives through food
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