Exploring future opportunities and barriers for business model concepts in personalized nutrition

Abstract

Our societies have to find ways to release the pressure on healthcare budgets from the consequences of unhealthy lifestyles and dietary behavior. As the science on the genetic basis and metabolic dynamics that control the relation between food and health progresses, the difficulties of achieving the lasting dietary behavior change where needed still presents a daunting problem and is mainly due to the inherent individual dimension of food choice and the concept of health. Personalized nutrition is a new approach that may help to overcome this problem by matching dietary advice with health requirements at a more individual level. Food4me has explored theemerging personalized nutrition offerings in the market and the barriers and opportunities as currently perceived from a consumer, industrial as well as societal perspective. This resulted in the development of a personalized nutrition system that describes the characteristics of a personalized nutrition concept and how it is influenced by its environment (societal, technical, commercial, political, legal, ethical, psychological). In order to use this to explore possible novel business model concepts, future scenarios were created to explore how value patterns around nutrition and health could shape future European societies by 2030. With two variables 'logic of healthcaresystems' and 'concept of health' defining the scenario space, for scenarios have been created: 'Super Sister', 'My health My Home', 'Me Inc' and 'Nudging World'. They will serve in the next steps of the project as a rich background to design novel business model concepts and to evaluate barriers and opportunities.