Personalised Nutrition for all - Announcement winners
The winners of the Personalised Nutrition for all - Call to action have been announced! This call invited multi-stakeholder initiatives, start-ups and early-stage solutions in the field of personalised to submit . The winners were awarded in the following three tracks:
- Route to market: reducing obesity and malnutrition by making tools more affordable and accessible to a broader community
- Behavioural Change: exploring how we can empower consumers to manage their health
- Science & Big Data: seeking toe enable a more targeted approach to consumers' health by use of data
The Personalised Nutrition for All - Call to action was an initiative of Food Innovation Hub Europe, Foodvalley and EIT Food.
Winners
Each winner was awarded with a prize-based award of 30.000 euros. In addition, they have the opportunity to participate in Foodvalley's Personalised Nutrition Community and get the chance to receive additional funding from EIT Food.
EktaH - new nutritional solutions to reduce body weight gain
EktaH is a French deeptech startup working on new nutritional solutions allowing overweight and obese populations to reduce their body weight gain by using a fat taste receptor agonist as a spray.
Expert in taste receptors, EKTAH develops also service offers to help Contract Research Organization (CRO) to measure anorectics peptides (CCK, PYY, GLP-1,..)and is therefore certified ISO 9001. Furthermore, the company is able to FMCG companies to carry out screening of taste modulators in order to confirm their effectiveness. EktaH is also interested in animal nutrition and food additives markets.
Organisations: EktaH, University of Burgundy
Delivery of personalised nutrition via corporate canteens based on real-time monitoring of the metabolic demands placed on the workforce.
Over two -thirds of adults in the EU are employed 5-6 days per week and spend almost half their waking hours at work, this provides a significant opportunity to positively influence diet-related ill health such as obesity through more targeted healthy eating strategies.
As the lead applicant Salus Optima – a digitally-enabled personalised nutrition company, together with the University of Bath and their Centre for Exercise, Nutrition and Metabolism and Compass Group – the worlds largest food service provider, will develop a scalable, affordable personalised nutrition offering. This will be deployed through corporate canteens and leverages real time metabolic health data.
The aim is to help people make better, more frequent food and lifestyle choices that enables them to lead metabolically healthier lives.
Organisations: L3M Technologies Ltd t/a Salus Optima, University of Bath, McLaren, Compass Group
Making Personalized Nutrition accessible to high-risk, underprivileged population
As digital innovative tools such as personalized nutrition ones are not always accessible to all today, Nutrinomics, a Belgian Healthtech startup active in Personalized Nutrition for chronic diseases, and the Belgian Heart Ligue, a non-profit association active in Belgium for cardiovascular prevention since 1968, are joining forces to offer nutritional guidance to high-risk, obese population, that have less accessibility and health literacy.
Using Belgian Heart Ligue communication vectors (cardiovascular diagnosis sessions in low-income communities, magazine, website, patient associations…), 130 overweight people will gain 6-month free access to the Zest platform, a personalized nutritional companion offering tailored readings, nutritional advice, personalized recipes, grocery lists and workshops as well as will benefit from online dietetic counseling for optimal adoption and behavioral change.
Organisations: Nutrinomics, Ligue Cardio
Logmeal - the AI-based nutritional tracker for objective, continuous, friendly and easy to use food intake monitoring Aigecko Technologies SL
AI, Computer Vision and Deep Learning for food recognition & monitoring using food pictures. We are the Shazam for food. We provide the system that nutrition experts need to boost the quality of information they need in order to improve people’s life. With only 1 picture of a dish we provide: group dish name, dish name, ingredients, 35 micro-macro nutrients indicators, food quantity estimation, objectively, auto-calculated, standardised, digitalised & in real time, friendly and easy to use food intake monitoring. The purpose of this project is to extend the LogMeal app and LogMeal API algorithms for food recognition with the food volume estimation algorithms.
Organisations: Aigecko Technologies SL, University of Barcelona
ELFI - Empowerment / Lifestyle & Food advice / Interaction
Diabetes has one of the greatest disease burdens: it reduces the quality of life due to the development of comorbidities and type 2 diabetes patients have a significantly higher chance of dying prematurely than people without diabetes. In The Netherlands about 1 million people are living with type 2 diabetes, and around the same number of people live with prediabetes, an early stage of diabetes. The number of people with type 2 diabetes will increase rapidly in the coming years due to ageing and bad lifestyle behaviours and will put extra pressure on healthcare resources and expenditure.
In this early onset of type 2 diabetes, cure is still possible when people change their lifestyle. Critical in lifestyle change is the empowerment of people to steer their own health and learn new habits. Existing initiatives such as GLI (combined lifestyle interventions) are costly and difficult to scale up. Innovative e-health solutions would offer the possibility to remotely monitor patients for lifestyle changes, weight loss and biomarkers.
In the present ELFI (empowerment, lifestyle & food advice, interactions) initiative, people with prediabetes are identified by their own GP during a health check risk assessment. In addition to the standard risk assessment, blood biomarkers such as HbA1c and lipids, and fat distribution are measured on the spot. Prediabetes patients will be offered personalised nutrition and lifestyle interventions, disease awareness and education, a live and online community, and remote monitoring and coaching by the GP and other relevant healthcare professionals, through an application. This may result in improved individual well-being, health, and quality of life for prediabetes patients, and at scale, it may improve population health and lower societal costs. The main goal of the first phase of this project is to investigate whether this straightforward, digitally-supported intervention is sufficient to empower prediabetes patients to adapt to a healthier lifestyle in order to prevent the onset of type 2 diabetes.
Organisations: Roche Diagnostics, HAPP, TNO Healthy Living, Digi.me
HYPER - Hyper personalised nutrition to tackle obesity
One-size-fits-all approaches to tackle obesity have failed. People respond differently to food consumption because of differences in genetic background and gut microbiota profiles. This might explain why food interventions are effective for some, but not for many others. Besides that, behavioural barriers play a large role.
In HYPER, seven organisations that are each frontrunner in their field join forces to bring truly personalised nutrition to the forefront of effective obesity management. Together they create a radically new concept with DNA, blood and gut flora testing, lifestyle advice, tailored meal suggestions and home delivery of personalised meals. This should ultimately stimulate the development of better food habits and lead to healthier BMI levels.
The final aim is to ensure that the concept can be implemented in healthcare throughout Europe.
Organisations: Verdify, Omniyou, MyMicroZoo, Fitsurance, X-Fitt, Henri, Maastricht University
Special recognition
Vegemi - using tech and play to increase personalised fruit and veggie consumption during early years in child health centres
Vegemi is a patent-pending food education app and concept, combining tech and animation to increase veggie consumption of young children.
The app uses AR, rewards kids with animated superpowers of health impacts, and is being developed as a tool for multi-stakeholders; retail, early years education, government and health officials – to serve public health.
Vegemi combines nutrition and food education, creates food awareness and leads a way for kids and families to accept healthy & environmentally friendly diets, creating personalised reports of consumed fruit & veggies to support healthy food choices. The concept can be applied to versatile environments, and is always free for the consumer. This way we make sure healthy food education reaches all children – regardless of socioeconomic situation.
Organisations: Venner Oy, LAB University of Applied Sciences, Suurseudun Ossuskauppa SSO, City of Espoo, Advicing collaborators