CONSUMER LAB VISUAL IDENTITY

The Consumer Labs vision is to develop a distributed UK-wide ‘Consumer Lab’ (a network of industry and academic members) that improves the ‘ecological validity’ of academic research by studying real-world food choices. Their ambition is to forge academic-industry collaborations that focus on ways to assess and understand everyday dietary behaviours. To achieve this objective, they plan to foster partnerships that incorporate novel methods of data capture, including, for example, the use of covert digital image capture, ecological momentary assessments, metabolic markers, continuous blood-glucose measurement, and wearable monitoring devices. They will also encourage the use of methods that enable dietary habits and preferences to be tracked over time, and approaches that incorporate multiple lines of evidence (e.g., supermarket loyalty-card data combined with direct observation), thereby improving the quality of evidence we can garner. Recognising seldom heard communities, we will prioritise methods and research aimed at studying dietary behaviour in these groups, thereby enabling the food industry to address the specific needs of different populations.