Project
IMAGINE: Innovations for the manufacturing and marketing of fully personalised food products
There is a growing understanding of how differently individual people respond to food, both physically but also in their dietary preferences, behaviour and psychology.
Personalised nutrition advice is a promising way to help consumers tailor their diets to their individual needs. However, it is currently challenging to convert health-related data into nutritional products, which could be a very convenient and effective way to help people get the right types and amounts of nutrients their bodies need.
The project
The main goal of the IMAGINE consortium project was to be able to make personalised food products available to consumers by connecting their personal preferences and health data to a digital food production technology, in order to promote people's well-being, health and functioning.
The results
The project has developed a flexible food production platform, which is a kind of mini-factory that can be used to create food precisely tailored to the personal nutritional needs of individual consumers or patients. With this system, more than 50,000 different personalised foods could be produced, each with different nutritional values, specific micronutrients, portion sizes and differences in taste and colour.
The feasibility of the technology was successfully demonstrated in two real-life consumer studies, one with military personnel and one with hospital patients. Consumers rated the personalised food products and use of the technology slightly positive to neutral, demonstrating the viability of the technology.
The developed technology and infrastructure allow us to conduct intervention studies to investigate the efficacy of personalised foods for specific consumers or patients.