Ensuring a Better Future of Food and Our Planet By Transitioning to More Sustainable Food Systems

The mission of the Future of Food Institute is to help accelerate the transition to a more sustainable food system, by including the consumer as an equally relevant stakeholder. By providing accessible and clear insights that help all links in the food chain to effectively support and seduce the consumer to make the sustainable choice.

In collaboration with EIT Food, Europe’s leading food innovation initiative, Future of Food Institute conducted a study to gain a deeper understanding about consumer attitudes towards the food chain, and particularly the role trust plays in that relationship.

The study Future of Food Institute co-created, consists of 12 strategies that can play a role in influencing consumers to eat more healthy, more sustainably, and to be more open towards food innovation. The aim of these strategies is to (re)build trust in the food system, as well as spark ideas for innovation.

Data for this study was collected using CMNTY Platform, a data collection solution which provides online insights communities as one of its supported research methods.

178 European citizens from 13 countries took part in a total of 40 (mini-)assignments. Over three 5 to 10 day periods, the participants took part in online focus groups with open discussions, photo assignments, short questionnaires, and polls. In a so-called Citizen Participation Forum, the online community participants completed a variety of different tasks. These include open questions in a forum setting, discussions, completing challenges, writing assignments, questionnaires and using images to create moodboards. Next to the forum, five online co-creation sessions (live focus groups) were held in which 24 participants took part.

The results of the study will be published https://www.futureoffood.institute/the-trust-project/

Before CMNTY Platform was selected as the preferred solution, the team of Future of Food Institute performed an analysis of available solutions in the market that could address their main concern: performing research in 13 countries, and recruiting a panel of participants from all these countries.

Future of Food Institute selected CMNTY Platform for its quality of data collected, combined with the great ease of use and the availability of the necessary modules, supporting their research needs within a single platform. On top of this, the full integration with Dynata, a global leader in first-party data with the richest recruitment sources and fully verified panelists, made recruitment a ‘piece of cake’, as per the words of Durk Bosma (research director). Durk really likes the ease of setup. For instance, they planned up to two weeks to set up a platform but were done in a single afternoon, and they’re still using that initial setup.

Eva Hoogstins (researcher) explained that “not one module was my favorite, but the versatility of all the modules combined allowing many different types of tasks without losing context”, is what she liked. Forums were used a lot to chat and messaging kept the participants socially engaged, next to surveys and online focus group sessions for real time video conversations combined with in-session polls. The ability to integrate external survey solutions, and still have a full overview of completion percentages in CMNTY Platform’s Completion Matrix was very helpful in managing the study. Overall, participants were enthusiastic to participate, proven by the high engagement level during the study.

The success of the initial EU study, the insights gathered, resulted in an extension of the project. The team’s experience with international studies has had a tremendous positive impact. The flexibility of the platform allowed for an agile approach to experiment with different groups of nationalities in different formats. Future of Food Institute now has standard formats that can be adjusted depending on how engaged people are reacting or according to the data collected.

Future of Food Institute continues to use CMNTY Platform for this and other projects. Interested in trying it yourself? Reach out for a demonstration followed by a trial.