TealHelix: Building Resilience Through Inclusive and Personalised Food Labeling

Project narrative

The TealHelix project focuses on empowering consumers through personalised and inclusive approaches to food sustainability. By leveraging motivational matching, this EU-funded project aims to develop new labeling strategies and digital social innovations to improve decision-making and address resistance to sustainability. By tailoring interventions to the specific needs of individual consumers, the project will address diverse consumer requirements across six EU pilot countries: Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Greece, and Poland. Drawing on life cycle analysis, social and economic environments, and consumer behaviour theories, a new measure will be created to assess how individual and planetary preferences for various sustainability dimensions can be aligned to reach sustainability goals. Next to that, a variety of labeling methods, including traditional, digital, and smart approaches in both retail and online settings, will be tested. To drive and ensure long-term change, integrity guidelines and industry standards for sustainability information will be established. Utilising interdisciplinary expertise in marketing, psychology, consumer behaviour, and more, the project will generate new methods and empirical evidence through big data analysis, surveys, and experiments. Findings will be integrated into AI-powered digital innovations to better understand and promote food sustainability labeling practices. As a result, TealHelix will offer deeper insights into how external environments influence attitudes and beliefs toward food sustainability labelling and it will explore effective strategies for motivating consumers, including vulnerable groups, to adopt sustainable labeling guidelines.