EIT Food Quisper Project

Quisper® has received funding from EIT Food, the innovation community on Food of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union, under Horizon 2020, the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.

Our activities aim to deliver a digital platform (Quisper®) as support for creating and delivering personalised nutrition services in Europe, based on a non-profit organisation. Services are being designed for use by companies, societal organisations, government healthcare services and individual healthcare professionals wanting to provide consumers with personalised nutrition advice.

The work includes:

1. Programming of a fully-fledged online digital service starting from a pre-beta version (Quisper Server Platform, QSP)
2. Further development and integration of the eNutri App for personalised food recommendations (test case)
3. Set-up of a non-profit association to manage Quisper® and related bodies and procedures (e.g. data management, scientific advisory board, communication and marketing functions, Quisper management and governance structures); and
4. Search for partners, suppliers and end-users to support and use Quisper®.

Consumers want to have healthier, more sustainable diets, and personalised dietary advice has been shown to be more effective than generic public health advice in achieving and sustaining behavioural change. Online and app-based nutrition and health services are numerous, but fragmented and rarely science-based, meaning end users find it difficult to discern quality, resulting in low trust, uptake and compliance. Also, most of these approaches focus on calorie counting rather than personalised dietary recommendations.

Quisper® is designed to create opportunities for individuals and organisations wanting to set-up personalised nutrition services (B2B). Integration and further refinement of a personalised nutritional advice app (to be linked to Quisper in 2019) will enable more accurate assessment of diet quality and generate targeted dietary advice (B2C). Both approaches are based on sound scientific principles and validated knowledge rules overseen by the independent Quisper Scientific Advisory Board (QuiSAB).

Quisper® will allow developers (B2B) to improve their personalised nutrition offerings with access to standards, data, knowledge rules, self-assessment products, and a network of stakeholders/ potential customers. Development and validation by Quisper should increase consumer confidence in commercial services, and pull together previously fragmented and disparate tools. Companies utilising Quisper will be charged for data, but this may be offset against data or apps contributed to the platform.

With numerous diverse products, each trying to build their own logic and scientific interpretation, there is a huge risk of adding to the existing confusion about nutrition and health information. In the area of personalised nutrition, Quisper® will be the first of its kind to bring an independent, scientifically validated tools and data via unified structure for personalised nutrition services.

Establishing a new entity is not without risk, but the draft business models were developed in partnership with stakeholders during QuaLiFY and are, therefore, already in an advanced stage. The basic IT components are in place, with both the platform and the personalised nutritional advice app currently at TRL5.

Attracting SMEs to integrate their products is challenging, but several have already expressed an interest and we welcome inquiries.

The purpose of QuaLiFY previously and, currently, Quality Information Service and Dietary advice for Personalised Nutrition in Europe (ID 18064) is to deliver Quisper®, a digital platform providing an interface between suppliers of data and knowledge rules, etc. and users (e.g. ICT companies, healthcare professionals, healthcare services) providing personalised nutrition advice.