What it's about

The DINER joint project contributes to the sustainable transformation of the food system by enabling and facilitating changes in consumption patterns in private households.

Project goal

The project aims to develop an automated and personalized food recommendation system that is easy for all consumers to use, promotes sustainable, i.e., healthy, environmentally and socially responsible nutrition, and at the same time expands users' knowledge about sustainable food. The application to be developed will use nudges, triggers, and priming effects to initiate implicit learning processes, thereby contributing to a more sustainable diet for consumers in a simple and natural way. Consumers' nutritional competence will thus be strengthened not through instruction, but through the sustainability-oriented design of nutritional environments.

In order to support consumers in achieving a more sustainable diet, this project aims to lay the foundations for creating a fair food environment. The aim is to help consumers identify sustainable foods and substitute less sustainable foods when deciding what to buy. The possibility of substitution (e.g., oat milk instead of cow's milk) enables a low-threshold adjustment of shopping behavior without attempting to change consumers' dietary preferences. In order to change shopping habits toward a sustainable diet, it is necessary to improve consumers' nutritional literacy. Consumers learn how to use more sustainable product alternatives in food preparation to create preferred taste experiences.

Project description

The prototypical development of the digital decision-making aid in the form of an app is based on four fundamentals: a co-creation process for designing a sustainable virtual nutritional environment, the technical fundamentals (data gathering and persistence), the integrative sustainability assessment of foods, and recommendations for improving recipes and cooking skills. In the course of the co-creation process, various display options are developed and tested with the target group (in the form of focus group discussions, questionnaires, and choice experiments) in the real-world laboratory. The application is being developed from scratch in the course of the project and is going through the TRL stages from technology concept to proof of concept and laboratory prototype to use in real-world laboratories.

The work on the technical foundations primarily involves the development of a sharing mechanism and an internal recipe repository for the project. The most important steps in the further development of the sustainability assessment are the extension of the NAHGAST assessment methodology to all meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), the revision of the indicator settings, and the integration of ecologically accurate prices. The development of rule-based recommendation patterns for improving recipes is based on compiling sustainable alternatives to common ingredients, developing sustainable variations of popular dishes, and providing tips for implementing sustainable meals. Based on these principles, the recommendation system will be developed as a prototype in the backend (technical logic) and frontend (user interface, user experience). As a basis for the subsequent commercial exploitation of the app, a start-up idea will be developed and elaborated into a Business Model Canvas (BMC), and a test campaign will be conducted to prepare for the market launch. The development of the BMC will draw on the results of the co-creation process, as well as a market and competition analysis and additional target group interviews. As part of the test campaign, the app prototype will be tested and incrementally refined.

Results

The main result will be a prototype tool that has been developed and tested in a real-world laboratory. The project also aims to develop a business idea and a marketing campaign. On this basis, the prototype will be further developed into a market-ready product in the exploitation phase following the project and launched on the market.

In addition, the participating universities, including Münster University of Applied Sciences, will use the project results for scientific exploitation and transfer. This includes disseminating the project results within the scientific community and incorporating them into teaching.