The world’s food system faces a great balancing act (World Resources Institute (Searchinger & et al., 2013)). By 2050 it must feed around 10 billion people (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, 2017) in a more sustainable way: without increasing the area of agricultural land, using less natural resources and, very importantly, emitting less greenhouse gases. In addition, diets should be healthier and meet human nutritional needs. They should prevent both malnutrition and non-communicable diseases, like obesity and cardiovascular disease.

The research area of sustainable nutrition attempts to provide answers on how to meet these challenges.

Healthy and sustainable diets

Businesses, governments and civil society organisations are all seeking ways to make our food more sustainable as well as healthier. Blonk can help your organisation clearly identify the options available to achieve this. The answer lies ultimately in finding the right balance between the sustainability and the health of foods. We use optimisation techniques to obtain a greater understanding of how to improve diets with minimum changes to eating habits.

Futureproof products for food and beverage companies

A main challenge for food and beverage producing companies is to become ‘future-proof’ with respect to health, environmental and other sustainability concerns. Future-proof food and beverage products have a right balance between the amount of nutrients and the environmental impact. This concept is called the Sustainability Nutrition Balance (SNB). It identifies whether a product or product group fits into a healthy and sustainable diet. In several steps the SNB-score can be determined and give directions towards the development of products that meet nutritional as well as sustainability requirements. With help of Optimeal we can investigate the SNB-score of a product or product portfolio.