Amongst the hubs is Consumer lab: building academic industry partnerships to ensure sustained acceptance of healthy foods, under Lead PI: Professor Jeffrey Brunstrom, School of Psychological Science, University of Bristol. The award is for £370,000, with an additional £1.5 million in funding to distribute over the next five years. 

Poor diet has a huge impact on public health. It’s possible to innovate and improve the nutritional quality of food, but these efforts are wasted if new products don’t appeal to consumers. While the UK has extensive expertise and research on dietary behaviour, the data is often collected in a laboratory and from unrepresentative samples. 

There is a clear need for better tools to understand food choice and how better food products can be accepted in real world settings. We also need to understand more about how changes to food packaging, labelling and how it is made available can influence people’s preferences and behaviours. 

This hub will transform opportunities for product innovation by addressing these long-standing issues and concerns. 

Our vision is to develop a distributed UK-wide ‘consumer lab’ comprising a network of industry and academic members with a portfolio of interdisciplinary methods. Combined, those methods will provide high-quality information about food choice and dietary behaviours in everyday places such as the home, cafés and school canteens. 

The hub will develop partnerships that incorporate novel methods of data capture, including capturing images of food intake in real-time, metabolic markers, continuous blood-glucose measurement and wearable monitoring devices. 

Recognising underrepresented communities, the hub will also prioritise methods and research aimed at studying food choice in these groups to help the food industry address their specific needs. 

Read the full UKRI press release