Consumer Lab: Building academic-industry partnerships to ensure sustained acceptance of healthy foods

不良饮食习惯对肥胖、糖尿病、心血管疾病和癌症等非传染性疾病的流行产生巨大影响。作为回应，研究人员可以通过创新来提高食品的营养质量。然而，如果新的和重新配制的食品被消费者拒绝，这些努力就白费了。在食物选择和饮食行为的生物、社会和心理控制的基础研究方面，英国可以说拥有相当多的专业知识。然而，数据通常是在实验室和不具代表性的样本（例如，大学生）中收集的，并且研究很少考虑已知随时间发生的偏好变化。工业和研究人员需要更好的工具来理解食品选择，衡量食品在“现实世界”的可接受性，以及偏好是如何通过其包装、标签和提供环境的变化而缓和的。我们的中心将通过解决这些长期以来对“生态有效性”的担忧，以及消费者行为的急剧变化是否会随着时间的推移而保持，来改变产品创新的机会。我们的愿景是建立一个分布在英国范围内的“消费者实验室”，包括一个由行业和学术成员组成的网络，以及一系列跨学科的方法，这些方法可以结合起来，提供关于现实世界环境（如家庭、咖啡厅和学校食堂）中食物选择和饮食行为的高质量信息。我们将建立学术界与工业界的合作伙伴关系，以评估长期的行为，并结合多种证据（例如，超市忠诚卡数据与直接观察相结合），从而提高我们可以获得的证据的质量。作为这一过程的一部分，我们将寻找机会发展合作伙伴关系，结合新的数据捕获方法，包括，例如，使用隐蔽数字图像捕获，生态瞬时评估，代谢标记，连续血糖测量和可穿戴监测设备。认识到边缘化和“难以到达”的社区，我们将优先考虑旨在研究这些群体的食物选择的方法和研究，从而使食品工业能够解决他们的特定需求。在发展消费者实验室的过程中，我们将弥合生物科学研究与翻译之间的差距。通过学术-行业合作伙伴关系，我们的研究重点将了解食品行业面临的挑战，并提供可操作的产出和影响。在我们的网络中开发的项目将解决行业挑战，对ecr的培训将培养一批具有行业相关技能的研究人员，他们为合作做好了准备。由于食物选择是其他中心活动的关键，我们将把我们的消费者实验室推广为一个可以在OIRC网络中访问和共享的重要平台。此外，认识到消费者评估是许多转化途径的关键要素，我们将从一开始就建立一个单独的中心外展委员会，积极向非oirc团体推广我们的消费者实验室。我们的中心汇集了一个经验丰富的多站点（布里斯托尔和利兹）团队，包括互补的学术和行业相关经验，以及在这类网络的日常管理方面的相当专业知识。我们有一个杰出的顾问小组，代表了来自几所不同大学和食品公司的专家，以及英国领先的独立社会研究中心NatCen。我们还确定了一个初步的中心成员，我们计划通过一系列网络和知识交流活动来扩大这个成员，包括为学术界和工业界的早期职业研究人员提供研讨会和培训。

Poor diet has a dramatic impact on the prevalence of non-communicable diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. In response, researchers can innovate to improve the nutritional quality of food. However, these efforts are wasted if new and reformulated foods are rejected by consumers. The UK can claim considerable expertise in fundamental research on the biological, social, and psychological controls of food choice and dietary behaviour. However, data are often collected in a laboratory and from unrepresentative samples (e.g., university students), and studies rarely account for changes in preference that are known to occur over time. Industry and researchers need better tools to understand food choice and to measure the 'real world' acceptability of food products, and how preference is moderated by changes to their packaging, labelling, and context within which they are made available. Our hub will transform opportunities for product innovation by addressing these long-standing concerns around 'ecological validity' and whether acute changes in consumer behaviour are preserved over time. Our vision is to develop a distributed UK-wide 'Consumer Lab', comprising a network of industry and academic members and a portfolio of interdisciplinary methods that can be combined to provide high-quality information about food choice and dietary behaviours in real-world settings such as in the home, cafés, and school canteens. We will forge academic-industry partnerships that assess behaviour over long time periods and incorporate multiple lines of evidence (e.g., supermarket loyalty-card data combined with direct observation), thereby improving the quality of evidence we can garner. As part of this process, we will seek out opportunities to develop partnerships that incorporate novel methods of data capture, including, for example, the use of covert digital image capture, ecological momentary assessments, metabolic markers, continuous blood-glucose measurement, and wearable monitoring devices. Recognising marginalised and 'hard to reach' communities, we will prioritise methods and research aimed at studying food choice in these groups, thereby enabling the food industry to address their specific needs. In developing Consumer Lab, we will bridge the gap between bioscience research and translation. Through academic-industry partnerships our research priorities will be informed by the challenges faced by the food industry and provide actionable outputs and impact. Projects developed across our network will address sector challenges, and training for ECRs will develop a cohort of researchers with sector-relevant skills who are prepared for collaboration. Because food choice is key to other hubs' activities, we will promote our Consumer Lab as an essential platform that can be accessed and shared across the OIRC network. In addition, recognising that consumer evaluation forms a key element of many translational pathways, from the outset, we will establish a separate Hub Outreach Committee, that actively promotes our Consumer Lab to non-OIRC groups. Our hub brings together an experienced multi-site (Bristol and Leeds) team that comprises complementary academic and industry-relevant experience, together with considerable expertise in the day-to-day management of networks of this kind. We have an exceptional Advisory Panel that represents expertise from several different universities and food companies, and NatCen, Britain's leading centre for independent social research. We have also identified an initial hub membership, which we plan to expand via a range of networking and knowledge-exchange activities, including workshops and training for early career researchers in academia and in industry.