Prototyping open innovation models in food and packaging

Open Food is a 6-year research project with a consortium including the Royal College of Art, Imperial College, Nottingham, Cranfield and Brunel Universities. Open Food is an EPSRC funded project focused on designing and developing a new crowdsourced food and packaging design and innovation platform.

Open Food was exploring the role of creative cooking from non-professionals. The creative cooking was analysed as exploratory, user-lead culinary activities that go beyond utilitarian needs and teach people something new. The project partners investigated the role of both physical (cooking spaces, kitchen tools, ingredients, peers) and digital tools in enacting creative cooking. In addition, the aim of the project was to understand how digital technologies might harvest, share and communicate cooking actions and resulting dishes in ways that are meaningful and transparent among stakeholders (laypeople, food manufacturer, market).

The project built new ICT platforms and tools, as well as analogue approaches, to enable the food industry to crowdsource sensory and experiential perceptions and attributes of food products and to translate those into customer requirements for new products, integral packaging and manufacture.