Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Grand opening meeting of the Food & Nutrition Delta

Food & Nutrition Delta is part of the innovation program Food & Nutrition. This program is carried out in dialogue with the Ministry of Economic Affairs, more specific the Agency NL Innovation.
On the initiative of the Dutch business community and knowledge providers, together with the Ministries of Economic Affairs, Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, and Health, Welfare and Sport, the innovation programme Food & Nutrition was created. This programme is focused at making the Netherlands a leading Food Innovation region in Europe.
Today, the 'grand opening' was at Fort Voordorp near Utrecht with a program of presentations on different relevant topics. Prof. Jaap Seidell and myself gave a workshop in the 'consumer behavior' track of the program. Prof. Seidell presented the rationale and some evaluation results related to the choices logo ('ik kies bewust logo'), i.e. a front of pack logo aiming to encourage consumers to make healthier choices within product categories and food producers to change their products to lower saturated fat, sugar and salt contents so that their produce meets the logo criteria. I presented on motivational and environmental determinants of fruit and vegetable consumption. A handout of my presentation can be accessed here.