Can food manufacturers drive personalised nutrition?

Personalised nutrition — ie, diets and nutritional programs that have been tailor-made for a person’s specific requirements — has long been considered a futuristic way of thinking about how we eat. With recent developments and funding for a slew of young companies, it might be an increasingly attractive proposition for manufacturers to consider.

The central idea of personalised nutrition (PN) is a simple one: if a consumer has a diet that is perfectly tailored to their lifestyle, exercise levels, amount of sleep they get, genetics, jobs and a number of other factors, they should be able to eat to the maximum level of healthfulness possible.

In its simplest form, PN is realised when a person visits a dietitian and comes away with a set of recipes that should keep them healthy. Added to this is the possibility of fitness-tracking watches and phone apps that will allow for the calculation of the nutritional profile of the foods that somebody is eating. More advanced methods of personalised nutrition are slightly more analytical in nature. There are already startups that will inspect your DNA to tell you where to concentrate your nutritional efforts and others that let you take a bevy of at-home tests to discover the best way to boost your gut health.

Food manufacturers and processors have little input into this form of PN but changing technologies mean that they will be able to contribute more to the field in the future, especially with consumers becoming more and more interested in maintaining a healthy diet in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, these companies could benefit from working in a growing field.

It obviously is not possible for consumers to pop into their local supermarket and locate a shelf with their name and details on it, readily stocked with the foods suited to their exact needs. However, this doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for consumers to expect a manufactured food that is suitable for their personalised diet. Manufacturers can concentrate their production efforts — and their advertising — on making foods with high levels of nutritious functional ingredients so that they can boost their health benefits.

Similarly, while producing custom food with a 3D printer is not an entirely novel concept, it is a possible way for healthy and nutritious food to be made. In fact, Nourished currently offers 3D-printed vitamins that provide the exact levels of nutrients that a consumer needs for their own body.

The loftiest prediction put forward for personalised nutrition is food that is manufactured with such specificity that it has been designed with a consumer’s very DNA in mind. While this scale of food manufacturing is likely to be impossible at any significant industrial level, food processors may want to consider leveraging the health effects of their products. For example, more and more people are suffering from gluten intolerance and diabetes each year; therefore, manufacturers might develop products to address these specific nutritional requirements.

Additionally, vegans and vegetarians continue to need healthy protein-rich foods, meaning manufacturers who offer versions of products with added protein, or any other functional ingredient, may see their products increase in demand.

Even simple measures like making nutritional information readily available on the aforementioned apps, or adopting health-rating systems, will make it possible for consumers to utilise products not developed specifically for a personalised diet.

The CSIRO expects that the value of the field of personalised nutrition will balloon from $66 million in 2018 to a heady $550 million in 2030, so manufacturers that target their products in this category could leverage a hungry market.

Although PN is still in the research and development phase, investors are splashing money around for companies that work in the field of personalised nutrition, with startup companies like Zoe and Nourished already raising tens of millions of dollars to develop technology to facilitate its widespread use.

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