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The application of emerging sciences, combined with consumer-based digital technologies, is paving the way for precision nutrition.
No longer regulatory and prescriptive labels, but informed choices guided by personalised information and an intelligent digital ecosystem.

THE BIG PICTURE

The ‘Farm to Fork’ Strategy urged to the adoption of a European Food Label to enable consumers for healthy, conscious and sustainable food choices.  As per document wording, key benefits aimed for consumers was to ensure healthiness, awareness and sustainability regarding food consumption. Given this context, new label solutions have been proposed with Nutriscore solution seeming as potential alternative. After initial traction, Nutriscore adoption stalled while sponsor countries, industries and retailers pulling back.
Last March, EU Commission reconsidered its support after facing high operational and political complexity. 

NUTRISCORE SETBACK

Thanks to good policy making, 450 million European consumers are granted the highest global standard for agricultural and food products. Via a consumer-centric approach quality and health are ensured across the EU agrifood value chain, from Soil to Shelf. Alongside, consumers understand food nutrients health impact. Thus, it did not surprise the consumers’ rejection to Nutriscore in relation to:

1. Complex calculation – Method is unclear and opens to trust issues (“What’s behind?”).
2. Prescriptive solution – Model forces to a univocal result, blocks choices and denies information.
3. Mono-dimensional tool – Focus is on What and not How to buy, no consumer education allowed.
4. Locked approach – Lack of personalization, consumers cannot ‘adopt and adapt’ the tool.

Moreover, prescriptiveness played against Nutriscore, given the need to allow informed choices.

FOOD SYSTEM & CONSUMER- KEY EVIDENCE

Understood that EU Politics never aimed at ‘prescriptivity’ but rather to provide to ‘healthy choices’, it is worth enlarging the picture to take into account the key evidence from food system and consumers. Particularly:

MANUFACTURER – Food labels play a key role in marketing strategy due to shopping decision impact. This impact becomes tangible when looking at the following business evidence:

1. Front-of-Pack drives in-store decision influencing up to 70% consumer choices.
2. Consumer interaction with pack is limited: 3 seconds time and 5 words reading.
3. Flash-on-Pack provokes a ‘Pavlov effect’ that drives sales, even without a promotion or price cut.

Manufacturers mandate then for simplicity on-pack and complexity out-of-pack. 

RETAILER – Labels can have a big influence on retailers’ P&L via impact on their Category Management Plans, those plans designed to foster financial sustainability via Cash-Profit-Volume targets. They can also influence shopping traffic inside stores (which drives ‘unplanned buying’, increasing average expense per store visit).

CONSUMER – Looking with evolutionary lens, the EU consumer can be defined Homo Consumer Digitalis, an informed individual with knowledge of food and nutrients impact. This Homo Consumer Digitalis requires a set of needs to food system: clarity, comprehension, choice, empowerment, personalization but also aims for a  food information stream that allows always-on interaction.

This calls for a food labels revolution with consumers needing key data easily processable and an added value guidance rather than a nutrients content table or a prescriptive buy/don’t buy diktat. On-pack label has to evolve into a digital interface able to feed & feedback the digital consumers. The One Fits All approach will abdicate to the Precision Nutrition Era.

RAISING THE BAR – THE ‘FOODOMICS’

Key enabler to the precision nutrition era is an emerging scientific application called Foodomics. This practise has the potentiality to recast food system changing the consumer approach to healthy food and wellbeing. The Foodomics seems also the Columbus egg to the WHO alert regarding the prevention and reduction of the Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD’s). Those are related to multifactorial conditions shaped by a wide range of environmental, social, and economic determinants rooted into a personal biological driver. Foodomics connects to this biological driver exploiting breakthrough medical studies able to revolutionise the approach to human nutrition. It builds on genomics – the study of an organism’s set of genes – applied to food to improve health and wellbeing. Foodomics can deliver value solutions to food system like:

• Guarantee food quality and safety (eg: Foodborne pathogens detection).
• Improve crop and livestock (eg: Identify genes associated with positive traits, as disease resistance)
• Detect food contaminants or adulteration(eg: allowing the alimentary frauds prevention).
• Assess food effects on human health and NCD’s prevention (eg: what-when-how much to eat).
• Develop new food products (eg: fostering specific food features for targeted consumers).
• Ensure food authenticity and traceability (eg: geo origin and species of food products via DNA profiling).

Foodomics is a breakthrough opportunity to improve consumer health and personalize shopping choices. 

PRECISION NUTRITION: THE NEW CONSUMER ERA

Assembling the key blocks we can design a consumer-based model plugged into food system and able to deliver personalized dietary solutions. Those building blocks are:

• Personal Medical status: age, sex, medical history, lifestyle, etc.
• Personal Foodomics: nutrients impact on the specific consumer’s health & wellbeing.
• Targeted Diet: based on the personalized food regime.
• Always on Ecosystem: rooted around a next generation APP exploiting an ‘adaptive learning AI platform’.

This model should be interconnected and self-updating as per data input and information exchange.

APP should be downloaded on mobile/wearables and tailored with consumer’s medical status and foodomics. As reference, the customization routine should be similar to adaptive learning platform APP like 360Learning (interactive learning) or Strava (connective fitness). After customization, an adaptive learning algorithm will start operating to execute tasks like food and nutrients selection, shopping list advise or interact to validate product match and nutrients intake. In case of diagnosed morbidity, the system can be further personalized with specific dietary regime signed by qualified professional, such as weight-loss or anti-morbidity diets.

The interface between food and pack will happen with two different modalities: a) On-line shopping  via an e-commerce application (eg: retailers site); b) Off-line at store  via interaction with the packaging. In both modalities, a value information flow is processed away from the pack and within a digital ecosystem. Current food labels will not fit this evolution and need to evolve to a digital icon able to spark the self-adaptive learning process, under the principle of Low Complexity On-Pack ->High Personalization Out-Of-Pack.

This digital icon must feed & feedback the always-on consumer ecosystem to perform a personalized set of actions, from shopping list preparation to nutrients validation vs. personal foodomics. The ecosystem can also initiate unprompted initiative and become proactive by integrating specific nutrients daily intake after having detected from wearables the consumer habits (For instance: increase carbo/protein intake on a specific week day dedicated to gym training or a specific activity).

Food labels logical progress into real time signalling solution printed on pack seems coherent with the next generation QR code which will leverage the use of enhanced 2D barcodes powered by the GS1 Digital Link standard. In fact, by 2027, current barcode will begin to disappear because GS1 – global group that introduced the barcode system – announced the switch to a new global standard called GS1 Digital Link, a web-connected next generation QR code that can hold far more information. This new GS1 Digital Link standard will:

1. Enhance data capacity – New 2D codes (QR and Data Matrix codes) holding more information as  Global Trade Item Number, Batch/Lot numbers, Traceability across Value Chain, Expiration dates, Serial numbers and all Product and Supply chain related details (including Origin, Blockchain and Sustainability).
2. Augment label functionality enlarging opportunities to manage consumer loyalty programme, benefit of a promotional plan, allow a ‘find my flavour/type’ option, detail ESG info or recommend specific food recipes.

This digital consumer ecosystem can exploit augmented connectivity at store based on emerging technology like next generation NFC/Near Field Communication (allowing seamless retail that simultaneously make a payment, add loyalty points and apply a prom in a single tap), Bluetooth E-Beacon (automatic interconnection once consumer mobile is within shelf area), RFID/Radio Frequency Identification (radio waves for automatic identification , able of reading multiple tags without direct sight), Augmented Reality/AR (ensuring consumers to point their mobile at a shelf to receive digital info or interactive content without a dedicated code marker).

It will be also possible a remote refresh to ensure consumers getting new input by the same GS1 digital link. This digital ecosystem can represent a Copernican revolution for the food system management.

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE PRECISION NUTRITION ERA

Foodomics full potential leverage will unlock a precision nutrition approach with the rethink of current food labels to next generation food labelling. A synergic move from politics, industry and retailers should ensure:

• Food labels reload to feed & feedback an underlying digital self-learning ecosystem.
• Shared and interconnected digital standards across the food system.
• Open data sharing for interconnection across value chain.
• Consumer Education to Precision Nutrition (School-Media-Social Networks).
• Incentives for disclosure: transparency ratings, rewards for open digital data, AI-readable info systems.
• Regulatory guidance to framework the new approach and foster the transition across food system.

EU Politics should guide the discontinuity confirming its forefront role on food quality and consumer health. Final reflection is for food industry and retailers: those ones leading the Foodomics era and its exploitation in terms of precision nutrition will achieve a compelling competitive advantage.

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