Mission: Healthier Lives through Food
The start of a three- to five-year programme of work, creating a roadmap to shape priorities for action.
We are halfway through a four-month sprint to create a roadmap for action to respond to the areas of greatest need in the Mission: Healthier Lives through Food.
This is an EIT Food initiative, intended to create societal and economic impact by tackling the incidence of Non-Communicable Diseases that are responsive to changes in nutrition.
The roadmap will set out action for the next three to five years where EIT Food and its partners can work together.
The roadmap team are the Austrian Institute of Technology, University of Torino, University of Reading, PepsiCo and Twine: bringing together scientific expertise, industry know-how and systems thinking.
We hope to see an increase in:
the numbers of consumers using technology, solutions or guidance developed with the support of EIT Food to personalise or change their diet in line with the Food-Based Dietary Guidelines for Europe
the number of food products on the market with levels of salt, free sugars, trans- and saturated fats reduced to, or below, recommended food-based dietary guidelines for Europe
the safer consumption of affordable food products on the market with an improved nutritional profile.
The story begins for me when Yvonne McMeel from the University of Reading invited me to join the consortium competing to win the commission to run this Mission. The team spent a concentrated month putting the proposal together over the summer and we were very pleased to hear that we had succeeded.
Our phased approach to producing the roadmap is to gather insights from experts and consumers, including those who may be under-represented in conversations of this kind, and validating these insights through qualitative interviews.
We will then run a two-day workshop to co-create the roadmap with people we have engaged with during these four months.
The implementation phase starts in January 2023.
It’s an exciting project with a lot of scope for positive action and we are all looking forward to seeing what comes next.
