The lack of confidence in current predictions of future consumer behavior leads to confusion about the potential success of innovations. This is hampering the development of the development of products, procedures and services that increase the sustainability of the food production chain. Improving the quality of these future consumer behavior predictions is therefore an important goal

within the ambitions of the Sustainable Food Initiative, endorsed by all partners in this project.

The aim of this proposal is to replace extrapolated current consumer behavior and experiences by consumer-based scenarios of their future behavior. This will allow the industry to better understand the different key drivers such as economic, social, technology, political and other factors that determine future

buying patterns and food consumption. These future scenarios are required to understand how future consumer’s behavior can be influenced towards healthier and sustainable choices. These

scenarios will give the food industry a much better view on the expectations from consumers towards food and will help the industry to contribute to sustainable, healthier and economic values for the Netherlands and European region. The results of this project will be also the base for broad scala of opportunities to drive the coming 5-10 years research and development program for the

food industry and the related innovation strengthening partners like universities and contract research program supported and aligned with the government strategy and vision.

Our consumer-based future scenarios will serve the food industry to implement innovations with more confidence in success. The project will review the current status of consumer attitudes towards sustainability and nutritional claims of the food industry. Next, we will identify gaps between the current visions from industry and consumers and use that analysis to generate and prototype new opportunities for innovative ingredients, products and services. In the second part of the project we will select the most interesting opportunities and demonstrate their potential using demonstrations in real-life or virtual environments resulting in a demonstration of the potential. Our approach will improve the long-term strategy building of the food industry towards healthy and sustainable food and is highly innovative. In our study we will compare the outcome of different approaches for consumer-based scenario-building and compare those current industrial strategies for consumer engagement. This by itself, is a totally new, multi-disciplinary approach. Furthermore, we will use new and ground-breaking methods to collect all delivered data in an unprecedented way. Involving the industrial partners in this process will safeguard full commitment and implementation of the results. Organizing demonstration activities with state-of-the-art concepting tools will bring a significant impulse for all parties involved in food innovation. The demonstration work package will ensure widespread implementation beyond the partners of the project thus leading to an improvement of the development of products, procedures and services that increase the sustainability of the food production chain.