This presentation will provide an overview of and update on the EIT Food project O-Live. Food choice is influenced by a complex interaction of cognitive, sensory, economic, and health factors that lead to gaps between customer intentions and behaviour. The interdisciplinary O-Live project, with partners Analytics Engines and EUFIC, aims to model the complex decision-making processes underlying an individual’s food choices and from this to design a tool that will identify the unique profile of consumers and provide tailored advice, enabling individual consumers to align their food choice with their intentions by removing the cognitive load of processing these multiple factors. The tool, co-created with consumers and aligned to other EIT Food projects, is unique in basing advice on cognitive biases and individual differences in sensory liking in addition to nutritional guidance. Advice strategies will be designed in such a way to exploit recent advances in “nudge techniques” to effectively, but indirectly, move consumers towards their desired food choices.
Rachel McCloy is Associate Professor in Applied Behavioural Science at the University of Reading UK, and lead on the EIT Food project “O-Live”. Her research interests fall broadly within the fields of judgment and decision-making and behavioural economics, with particular areas of interest in improving risk judgments, understanding food choice and pro-environmental behaviours, and applying psychology to public policy issues.