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Background and challenges

The challenges linked to the sustainability of food systems require constant research for innovations to encourage diets of good nutritional quality and respect for the environment. Highly processed food is a large part of modern diets and consumers are faced with an extremely diversified offer, from a gustatory and hedonic point of view, as well as from the point of view of nutritional characteristics, the degree of processing, the link with the economy of the territories or the impact on health and the environment. Thus, consumers must deal with constant trade-offs between pleasure, price, habit, meal preparation time and all the various dimensions of product quality.

Consumers need support to make good food – and more broadly, diet - choices, and, public policies must be informed by documenting the state of food supply and consumer trade-offs. To support the adoption of healthier and more sustainable diets, research must have knowledge on the different dimensions, thanks to reliable databases, allowing the characterisation of food products. Taking into account consumption data and food characterisation data simultaneously is therefore essential to meet these transitional challenges. Existing indicators are generally scattered, not very interoperable, costly, and even incomplete.

Goals

The consortium aims to guide research around the use of databases and indicators in order to understand the actions and strategies of processors (industrialists and distributors), as well as the food choices and behaviours of consumers, and to promote healthier and more sustainable food. Its task is to:

• establish an inventory of existing data on food products and available indicators
• co-construct an evaluation grid for these databases
• reflect on the necessary and relevant indicators to answer the initial questions (encouraging healthy and sustainable diets), identify the missing data to build these indicators, and better qualify the supply and choice of food products and more generally consumer diets
• integrate into the discussions the issues linked to the management of a data platform (accessibility, interoperability, data feeding, durability of databases, security, etc.) in connection with the Odalim platform
• propose a reflection on the research avenues to be developed to evaluate the trade-offs, tensions and compromises between the various indicators of these databases for a better understanding of consumer behaviour.

INRAE units involved

• Food and Bioproduct Engineering Research unit
• Economie publique
• Centre des sciences du goût et de l'alimentation
• Sécurité et qualité des produits d'origine végétale
• Centre de recherche en épidémiologie et statiques
• Alimentation et sciences sociales
• Toulouse School of Economics
• Agroécologie, innovations, territoires
• Innovation et développement dans l'agriculture et l'alimentation
• Groupe de recherche en agroalimentaire sur les produits et les procédés