nir-vana innovation network

The consortia of Slovenian public and private research organizations has developed a database to support consumers in making informed decisions about their food consumption.
Food safety is everybody’s concern and foodborne illnesses are more than ever present in today’s world. Foodborne illnesses may result from a busy lifestyle, mass production practices, unhealthy food habits, all of which are part of modern life. It is, therefore, a great concern of the society to provide guidelines and information to consumers about food products and their safe and healthy use. This can be better supported by accurate data about food profiles (contents, additives, calories, etc.) for modern industrial nutrition products in the market.
The database contains over 37.000 food products available on Slovenian and Eastern European market. It is organized according to standardized format Food data structure and format standard (BS EN 16104:2012). This European Standard specifies requirements on the structures and semantics on food datasets and of interchange of food data for various applications. The standard regards data as datasets covering: (i) identification, description and classification of foods including food ingredients, (ii) quantitative and qualitative food properties, (iii) data quality values and other metadata, (iv) specifications of methods used for obtaining these values, (v) references to sources for the information reported.
Many practitioners in the field of fitness, obesity, well-being and medicine do counselling on proper dieting to their customers. The range of possible users is wide and includes, in addition to patients and dietitians, also organizers of nutrition in educational institutions and homes for the elderly, healthy people (e.g. pregnant and breastfeeding mothers, athletes), researchers, students and food producers.
The consortia of research institutes employ the developers of the database, which are constituted of experts in natural sciences, engineering and experts in research on food and nutrition. The institutes combine their expertise with a long tradition in the development of advanced computing structures and algorithms for efficient massive-data processing and effective human-machine interaction, research and education in the field of nutrition and advising the food industry in the formulation and labelling of foods.
The consortia of research institutes is looking for licensees for the database. The software application programming interface (API) is available for data accessing from software-client applications. The offer does not include end-user applications for diet planning or counselling. Partners are sought in fitness and sports, nursing, healthcare and wellbeing, and in academia in the field of nutrition and sports.
The partners will get an access to the database via application programming interface (API) under licensing agreement. They would then provide / develop their own applications for data interpretation and presentation according to their use case and their end-users.

Advantages & innovations

The main advantages of the proposed solution: • A centralized database of food profiles. • Compliance with the standard for food description and classification: Food data structure and format standard (BS EN 16104:2012) • Software application programming interface (API) for data access from client applications.

Stage of development

Already on the market

Partner sought

Licensing agreements: to access the database via API to the partners in fitness and sports, nursing, healthcare, and in academia in the field of nutrition and sports. The partners role is the use of the database for the interpretation and presentation of data and the development of end-user applications to serve their clientele needs.