Shaping smarter consumer food choices: The FoodSMART project

Abstract

Compared to meals prepared at home, meals eaten out of home tend to contain more energy, total fat and saturated fat and it is here where consumers can have very little knowledge of the nutrient profile of the dish they are eating. The aim of the European Union‐funded FoodSMART project (http://www.foodsmartproject.net) was to develop an innovative technical menu solution ‘app’ that enables informed consumer food choice, which takes into account individual preferences (such as dietary requirements) as well as food product specifications, in a workplace canteen setting. A best–worst scaling questionnaire was conducted to identify consumers’ functional app requirements and inform the development of personalised food choice messages. Proof of concept was tested using the System Usability Scale in consumers from four European countries (Denmark, France, Greece and the UK). Information on ingredients, nutrition, food ‘naturalness’ and value for money were those most valued by consumers, with this presented ideally in a personalised way and using a traffic light model. Field trials of the FoodSMART app indicated that consumers found it to be simple, easy to use and attractive for frequent use. By gaining insight into the needs of consumers, dietary information can be better tailored and provided in an appropriate format to enable informed food choice.

The Organic Food Choice Pattern: Are Organic Consumers Becoming More Alike?

“…The BWS method was introduced by Finn and Louviere (1992), who used it to measure public concern about food safety. The BWS method has since been used in numerous and diverse searching backgrounds, including animal welfare [ 58 ]; landscape architecture [ 59 , 60 ]; elderly well-being [ 61 ]; perception of success in professional carriers [ 57 , 62 ]; corporate social responsibility [ 63 ]; consumer behavior towards agri-food products [ 64 , 65 , 66 ]; consumers’ functional application (app) requirements [ 67 ]; and above all, health care [ 68 , 69 , 70 ].…”

Food Informatics—Review of the Current State-of-the-Art, Revised Definition, and Classification into the Research Landscape

“…Vice versa, Smart Health apps might influence the consumption of food [26]. Additionally, somehow related to the this area are newer works that target the field of (personalized) nutrition, for example, smart food choices that support the choice for food of a consumer [27] as well as nutrition informatics, which "describes approaches to understand the interactions between an organism and its nutritional environment via bioinformatics-based integration of nutrition study data sets" [28].…”

Digital Tools to Promote Healthy Eating for Working-Age Individuals: A Scoping Review

“…Objective Among the 16 included papers, 10 papers presented digital tools and designs aimed at identifying eating moments in real-life settings [9,17,19,30,36,37,[44][45][46]54], while the other papers focused on improving eating behaviors and food choice [1,13,22,26,42,53] (as shown in Table 2). Specifically, regarding the 10 papers about eating moments identification, seven [9,17,19,[44][45][46]54] utilized digital tools to automatically monitor daily eating time and duration.…”

“…In two [30,36] papers eating moments were measured by distinguishing eating activities from other daily activities, such as working, speaking, and walking. In terms of improving eating patterns and food choice, two studies [22,42] involved encouraging healthy food choices by scanning codes to obtain interactive information about related foods. Two other studies have promoted healthy eating habits at work [26,53].…”