IMAGINE
IMAGINE was a consortium project supported by two Topsectors (Life Science and Health and High-Tech Systems and Materials), in which WUR and TNO worked together with a wide group of industrial partners to develop an innovative digital food manufacturing technology for producing personalized food products.
Why? There is a growing understanding that individuals differ in their body responses to specific foods and nutrients, in their dietary preferences, as well as in their behaviour and psychology. Personalised foods that contain the nutrients based on these individual needs are promising to improve health, performance and well-being. Maybe even more important, the technology empowers the consumer to decide what they want to eat, to improve their motivation to consumer the food product that contains the nutrients they need.
The main objective of the consortium project IMAGINE was to deliver personalised food products into consumers’ daily life by connecting personal data and digital food manufacturing technology, thus allowing consumers to be and/or perform at their best. IMAGINE developed a flexible food manufacturing platform based on a digitally controlled 3D printing process. This enabled on-demand production of fully personalised food products, based on a personalised nutrition advice.
The project demonstrated for the first time how the personal nutritional requirements of individual consumers or patients can be fulfilled by means of the flexible food manufacturing platform. With this system, over 50,000 different personalized foods could be produced, each with a different nutritional value, specific micronutrient contents, product sizes and differences in taste, flavour and colour. The feasibility of the technology was successfully demonstrated in two real-life field lab studies, with two distinct consumer groups: military personnel and hospitalized patients. An important next step would be to test if the consumption of the personalized foods would also result in improved health benefits. This was however out of scope for the current project and could be a nice follow-up: the technology and infrastructure developed allows us to perform intervention studies to research the efficacy of Personalized Foods for specific consumers or patients.
