WP5: Consumers, innovation and market opportunities

Knowledge of the  consumers  perceptions related to high-protein plant-based foods is necessary to succeed in a future shift towards a more sustainable diet. The work package shall provide insight about consumer demands for plant-based products and their markets, and uncover current barriers in the food system blocking the shift towards a more sustainable diet. 

Objectives:

Understand European lead markets with high plant based food consumption, apply insights to future scenarios for Norway. Understand consumer, industry, retailers, and food service providers’ attitudes, barriers and needs related to increased consumption and sales of plant based food. Develop viable opportunities to increase production and consumption of Norwegian produced plant-based food. Develop design thinking based collaboration and co-creation innovation techniques and models for sustainable food production and as novel collaboration tool in research projects.

Key research tasks:

T5.1 Investigate European lead markets with high plant based food consumption/offering:

Build a knowledge platform around supply, consumption, communication approaches (label, in store, advertisement, and policy), and products in selected lead countries (i.e. UK, Germany, France) and compare them to Norway. Develop future scenarios for Norway in light of the observed data and trends and assessment of these scenarios in a multidisciplinary approach by consumers, industry, and experts with regards to likelihood and impact.

T5.2 Investigate consumer, industry, retailers, and food service providers’ attitudes, barriers, and needs related to increased consumption of Norwegian protein-rich plant-based food:

Conduct interviews and focus groups using European benchmarking products as stimulus to explore knowledge, attitudes and beliefs related to protein-rich plants and products developed from such plants including retail communication. Develop and execute a large-scale consumer survey (N=500-1000) using a representative sample of the Norwegian population to investigate the distribution of knowledge, attitudes, preferences, and barriers consumers have related to consumption of protein-rich plant-based food. Include France for comparison in a cross-country study jointly with our partner INRA. Run interviews with industry, retailers, and food service providers about beliefs, barriers and needs related to increased sales of Norwegian protein-rich plant-based food products and include other countries for comparison of attitudes.

T5.3 Validation with consumers and industry:

Validate products and novel concepts with consumers and industry partners by using prototypes from WP3 and concepts developed in T5.4. The use of consumer/user co-creation techniques such as speed loop testing and hackathon events lead by designers will assure rapid iteration of ideas and high relevancy of the project outcomes for the future consumers. Conduct randomized trial field experiment in canteens of project partners to test acceptance and satisfaction with products using protein-rich plants and products developed from such plants as main protein source (incl. nudging).

T5.4 Innovation strategies and methodologies:

Match consumer and market needs from T5.1, T5.2, T5.3 with feasible technology and product ideas according to possible impact (sustainability, health, agriculture, value creation potential) from WPs 1, 2, 3, 4. Perform an opportunity map workshop as central collaboration and knowledge transfer mechanism in the FoodProFuture project. Develop innovation strategies for new products, services, business models etc. to “serve” the most viable future scenarios (input from WP2 and 3) in line with WP1 (sustainability, carbon footprint). Develop design thinking based collaboration and co-creation innovation techniques and models for sustainable food production and product development in close link to WP3.