“Use-inspired research”: UC Davis drives nutrition innovation with consumers in mind

06 May 2024 --- The Innovation Institute for Food and Health (IIFH) at the University of California (UC), Davis, US, aims to foster innovation in nutrition by bringing research and commercialization together. The institute aspires to create “happier, healthier lives for everyone” through market discovery, talent development and research. 

Nutrition Insight takes a deep dive into the concept of use-inspired research at IIFH, which the institute defines as “expanding the frontiers of knowledge with the needs of the end user in mind.”

We continue our conversation with John Melo, CEO at PIPA and IIFH advisory board member, who previously highlighted the institute’s ambitions in creating a future workforce and addressing global nutrition challenges. 

“At IIFH, we have to be considered and focused on starting with a consumer and ensuring we understand consumer preferences and attitudes so that we can position the technologies in a way that they have the best impact possible,” says Melo 

Challenges to innovation 
Melo highlights the challenges in creating healthier nutrition in terms of linking data back to science and understanding how to connect it to humans. However, through “experimentation and, hopefully, through a lot more AI, we can get good at that.” 

He underscores that innovation has to work at the consumer level to be successful. If it doesn’t, it’s not a commercial success and therefore, “no matter how great the innovation or technology is, it becomes a complete failure.” 

“What inspires me around the work we’re doing at UC Davis and how AI comes to the center is this idea that we start with consumer perceptions. What are their preferences, and where are they leaning? And how can we use that to inform how we position the technology and get faster adoption?”

He further underscores the importance of reducing the friction to adoption to reduce costs because it costs time: “Time can break or cause failure in trying to launch a new technology.” 

Use-inspired research focuses on conducting research and creating products with the needs of the end user in mind.From consumer to formulation
To determine what works with consumers, Melo highlights the power of social networks to capture the true sentiment of consumers. 

“If you apply technologies like AI, you can quickly start determining the framework or skeleton of the consumer’s mind. What do they like or dislike about current formulations and products? And what insights can we derive from that to help us formulate better products?”

This process is based on publicly available data, where consumers share how they feel about what they consume in a safe space.

Melo details that the model starts with consumer preferences, translating those into key attributes and then driving it back to the molecular level to formulate something that delivers on the targets defined to significantly reduce the amount of experimentation, development time and cost of bringing new products to market. 

For example, UC Davis-born “better-for-you” snack company Rivalz aimed to develop a great tasting, highly nutritional, salty snack, delivering on consumer preference. 

“In that particular case, it’s the mouthfeel and taste — what is the level of crispness they expect? How do we deliver the nutritional package inside of it? And how do we deliver all that in a way that they think about it as, hey, this is good for me, and I like it,” he explains. 

The real breakthrough comes from combining “this is good for me” with “I like it.”

“How do we take that from that consumer to formulations, looking at health data, manufacturing technology (in that case extrusion technology) to configure it in the best way possible to deliver that right mouthfeel for the consumer.” 

Understanding consumer preferences and attitudes is key for technologies to have the best impact possible, says Melo.Start-up success
According to Melo, research into alternative proteins found many failures in the industry, with most success cases coming from big corporations, who hold a “tremendous amount of data” on consumer preference.

If an alternative protein “doesn’t taste as good or better, doesn’t truly deliver better nutritional benefit and isn’t truly more sustainable in a data-driven way,” it will fail. He underscores that consumers share this sentiment online, saying that even if it is nutritionally better, it looks terrible and feels bad when they eat it. 

Again, taking Rivalz as an example, Melo applauds the company for putting AI in the center. 

“Because of the risk of getting it wrong on the consumer side, the economics and the state of the sustainability equation are very high. And if there isn’t a way to accelerate that, there isn’t enough capital that makes these things viable for investors, which means they’ll have a hard time becoming real companies at some time in the future.” 

“That’s sad because without them becoming real companies sometime in the future, there isn’t a sustainable proposition for the consumer.”

Transforming through AI
With his experience of introducing successful science-driven consumer brands and many different categories and product formulation, Melo highlights the transformative power of AI. He explains that he “had to build a huge organization, hundreds of people to do that. Most people will not raise the money to invest the capital needed to achieve that.”

He notes that AI will “enable everybody to do that” for a fraction of the cost. “With AI, I don’t need hundreds of people, I don’t need a billion dollars of capital and I can predict pretty accurately to have a 4.4 star [rating] for that level of stock keeping units.” 

Previously, Melo cautioned that a lack of understanding of what AI means is its most significant challenge, which needs to be addressed. 

“What we need to solve is making sure that the connection of promise versus reality stays tight and that we bring behaviors and people along with us in that journey of transforming businesses, enterprises, processes and the impact,” he concludes.

“At the end of the day, the beneficiary is consumers having better products and the planet being safer and more sustainable because we’re making the right formulas work for everybody.”

By Jolanda van Hal