Sustainable diets

The main challenge for companies producing foods and beverages is to become 'future-proof' regarding health, environmental, and other sustainability concerns. Future-proof foods and beverages properly balance their nutritional value and environmental impact. This concept is called the Sustainability Nutrition Balance (SNB), which identifies whether a product or product group fits into a healthy and sustainable diet. The SNB-score can be determined in several steps, offering directions toward developing products that meet nutritional and sustainability requirements. Blonk Consultants developed the Optimeal optimization tool to grasp the complete picture of and study healthy and sustainable diets and assign SNB-scores to products or product portfolios.

Defining healthy and sustainable diets, with help of optimization. 

Optimeal is a software solution that uses optimization to solve dietary questions that involve sustainability, as well as nutritional parameters. The tool helps to identify new opportunities and to elevate dialog on eating for a healthy and sustainable future.

In order to reach the goals and to make the shift to this sustainable and healthy food system, everyone needs to participate. This means governments, private sector, civil society organizations and consumers need to be involved. We see that companies, governments and civil society organizations are looking for ways to tackle the challenge and aim to define the contours of a healthy and sustainable society. However, defining healthy and sustainable food patterns is complex. To help organizations to come up with sound solutions, we have built a tool, Optimeal, which enables to grasp the full picture of healthy and sustainable nutrition.

WWF launched the European Eat4Change project to make young Europeans aware of ways to develop and adopt a healthier and more sustainable diet. Our current food system has a substantial environmental impact. With Eat4Change, WWF wants to make food production more sustainable, combat biodiversity loss and tackle the climate crisis. As part of this European project, on behalf of WWF Belgium, we analyzed which products fit into a sustainable and healthy diet for a family of four. We did so using our Optimeal software tool. The results also show that a sustainable and healthy diet is cheaper than the average Belgian's current dietary pattern.

In 2011 WWF UK published the first 'Livewell plate'. This was very successful in putting the topic of sustainable diets on the agenda of governments, food companies and health organisations, as well as demonstrating that it was possible to incorporate sustainability in dietary recommendations. Building on this success and the 'Paris Agreement' WWF UK decided to update the Livewell Plates. The new Livewell Plates demonstrate that by adopting a sustainable diet it is possible to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees.

Mérieux NutriSciences | Blonk is a leading international expert in food system sustainability, inspiring and enabling the agri-food sector to give shape to sustainability. Our purpose it to create a sustainable and healthy planet for current and future generations.

We support organizations understand their environmental impact in the agri-food value chain by offering advice and developing tailored software tools based on the latest scientific developments and data.