WiseFood - Leveraging data and AI to empower citizens to make healthier and more sustainable food choices

PROBLEM

Healthy and sustainable meal planning is often time-consuming and difficult. Existing tools provide limited personalization and may ignore dietary restrictions, budgets and environmental impacts, contributing to planning fatigue and food waste.

SOLUTION

FoodChat, developed within the WiseFood project, is an AI-powered conversational assistant that creates personalized meal plans based on dietary needs, allergies, budgets and preferences while aligning with national dietary guidelines. Users interact through natural language and can refine recommendations.

FoodChat is co-designed and validated through Living Labs in Ireland, Hungary and Slovenia, ensuring safe recommendations and continuous improvement based on user feedback.

BENEFITS

FoodChat helps nutrition practitioners and dietitians by automating personalized meal planning, freeing up time for counselling and supporting users in maintaining healthy habits. For households, it reduces planning effort and food waste through smarter recipe selection and ingredient substitutions while encouraging family participation in healthy and sustainable eating. Explainable AI features increase trust by clarifying nutritional and environmental trade-offs behind recommendations.

FoodChat may also support public health and sustainability initiatives. Its modular design provides researchers with a platform to study user preferences, develop recommendation methods and adapt the system to different populations and contexts.

PRACTICAL RECOMMENDATIONS

Dietitians and healthcare providers can integrate FoodChat as a digital support tool to generate scalable, evidence-based meal plans for their clients. Food businesses can use the platform to promote seasonal and locally sourced ingredients. Practitioners should encourage users to interact through natural language and provide continuous feedback, allowing recommendations to better adapt to their needs and lifestyles.

• An Introduction to the WiseFood Platform and Applications: FoodChat explanation…

PROBLEM

Recipe information is often incomplete and difficult to compare. Most recipes lack clear information on nutrition, sustainability, allergens, affordability and preparation effort, making informed food choices challenging for consumers and practitioners.

SOLUTION

RecipeWrangler, developed within the WiseFood project, enriches recipes with nutrition, Nutri-Score, carbon footprint, allergen and dietary information. It links ingredients to food composition and sustainability databases and provides transparent explanations for recipe scores. Users can search and compare recipes based on health, sustainability and practical criteria.

The tool is co-designed and validated through Living Labs in Ireland, Hungary and Slovenia to ensure regional relevance and continuous improvement.

BENEFITS

RecipeWrangler helps citizens, dietitians, educators, researchers and digital food services compare recipes and support healthier and more sustainable food choices. Transparent scoring strengthens trust and supports meal planning, recipe recommendations and food innovation.

PRACTICAL RECOMMENDATIONS

Practitioners can use RecipeWrangler as a transparent recipe profiling tool to compare, recommend and explain recipes. Citizens and food advisors can compare recipes according to nutrition, sustainability, allergens and preparation effort. Dietitians can use recipe profiles to support personalised guidance and explain recommendations.

Food businesses and digital service providers can integrate RecipeWrangler into recipe search, meal planning and recommendation systems. Researchers and public-health actors can use it to analyse recipe profiles under different dietary requirements and data sources. RecipeWrangler should be used as an explainable decision-support tool rather than a black-box scoring system, helping users communicate results and build trust in food recommendations.

• An Introduction to the WiseFood Platform and Applications: explanation on Recip…

PROBLEM 

Citizens, nutrition professionals and researchers face an overwhelming amount of nutrition, food and sustainability information spread across scientific papers, guidelines and online resources. Conflicting messages and evolving evidence make it difficult to identify trustworthy answers.

SOLUTION

FoodScholar, developed within the WiseFood project, is an AI-powered tool that turns scientific literature and dietary guidelines into searchable nutrition knowledge.

Users receive evidence-based answers with citations, summaries and topic recommendations. The platform is being co-designed and validated through Living Labs in Ireland, Hungary and Slovenia.

BENEFITS

FoodScholar provides fast access to trustworthy nutrition information and supports informed decisions through transparent citations.

Users benefit from quicker evidence retrieval and support for education and advisory activities. The platform also enables innovation in digital nutrition services and evidence-based food solutions.

PRACTICAL RECOMMENDATIONS

FoodScholar can be used as a trusted daily support tool for evidence-based nutrition and food-related decision-making. Users are encouraged to:  

• Formulate questions in natural language to quickly retrieve evidence-based answers,   
• Explore related topics and follow-up questions to deepen understanding,   
• Use AI-generated summaries to rapidly assess scientific articles and guidelines,   
• Verify information through the provided citations and source links,   
• Utilize the knowledge graph to identify relationships between nutrients, foods, diseases, and sustainability factors.   

Dietitians and healthcare professionals may integrate FoodScholar into clinical counseling and educational activities, while researchers can use it to accelerate literature exploration and evidence discovery. Food businesses and innovation actors may also leverage FoodScholar to support sustainable product development and science-based communication strategies.

• An Introduction to the WiseFood Platform and Applications: FoodScholar explanat…