TealHelix: Building Resilience Through Inclusive and Personalized Food Labeling

TealHelix aims to advance food sustainability labeling by proposing a more targeted approach: Empowerment through personalization and inclusion. Based on the logic of motivational matching, the project develops a range of new labeling approaches and digital social innovations to support consumers' decision-making in a targeted way. Such an approach also aims to overcome resistance to sustainability ideas by tailoring interventions to the heterogeneous individual needs of vulnerable consumers. By integrating top-down and bottom-up methods, insights from life cycle assessment, social and economic environment analysis, as well as relevant theories and operationalizations for consumer behaviour, the project will develop a new tool to assess how individual and planetary preferences for different sustainability dimensions can be reconciled to achieve sustainability goals. Subsequently, using citizen science and involving marketing agencies as well as food retailers, a range of communication methods will be tested: traditional labeling approaches, digital and stationary retail labeling approaches and smart labeling approaches (AI-based mobile apps, shopping assistants, retail entertainment, smart e-commerce). In cooperation with leading European associations, develop new guidelines/standards for the provision of sustainability information for the industry.