Call for partners | CREDO: Rebuilding Trust in Food Processing: Turning Consumer Confusion into Competitive Advantage

Deep insights into what drives consumer trust, acceptance, and engagement with processed foods allow companies to craft targeted messages, refine product design, and guide innovation strategies in ways that resonate with consumers’ attitudes, needs and expectations. In doing so, sustainable and healthy processed foods can move beyond processing skepticism.  

By investing in rigorous consumer research, combining qualitative and quantitative methods with real-life shopping experiments and creative co-creation methods, companies can better understand purchasing behaviour, address misconceptions, and optimise product experiences. Ambivalent, highly processed food products of participating companies will be used to evaluate conscious and unconscious consumer behaviour. This approach allows companies not only to understand what consumers say, but also how they choose, decide, and act in real shopping environments.

This research will deliver actionable insights, including:

• Report on consumers’ key (mis)conceptions, attitudes, and prioritised information needs
• Creative co-created tools and materials for effective communication
• Robust insights into consumer attitudes, trust, and behavioural responses to different communication concepts tested in combination with your food products;
• Clear, evidence-based guidelines to support effective, credible, and trusted communication about food processing across commercial, policy, and public contexts.

Together, these outputs will enable partners to design more effective communication strategies, reduce consumer misunderstanding and distrust, support responsible innovation, and strengthen consumer acceptance and market success of processed food products.