Successfully connecting the dots in Personalized Nutrition

Tailored approaches to health and wellness

• Consumers are increasingly looking for tailored approaches to their health and wellness to help meet specific health goals. As such, there has been a surge in development of technologies that can deliver the data and insight required to create effective personalized nutrition solutions.
  
• dsm-firmenich has strengthened its commitment to personalized nutrition with the acquisition of digital health platform, AVA, which provides machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze consumer behavior, wellness and consumption patterns.
  
• Combined with dsm-firmenich’s breadth of expertise in nutrition science, products and solutions, the move will provide access to unique consumer insights and support the dietary supplement and food and beverage industries to drive new advances in this exciting space.

Consumers are increasingly looking for science-based and data-driven nutritional solutions that are tailored to their specific health goals. Recent advances in diagnostics and tracking are helping to meet these needs, by allowing individuals to uncover key information about their health and wellness markers. Personalized nutrition solutions are one way in which brand owners can create bespoke diet and supplement plans for consumers – presenting a customized solution, rather than relying on generic population-based guidelines to improve health benefit outcomes. Recent research has also highlighted the benefits of personalized nutrition in a hospital setting, where malnutrition is prevalent.

Where data and nutrition meet

To help bridge the data gap and bolster its personalized nutrition offering, dsm-firmenich recently acquired AVA, a state-of-the-art digital health platform that leverages machine learning and AI to analyze behavior, wellness and consumption patterns and provide end users with adaptive nutrition recommendations and live coaching. The addition of AVA’s advanced technology will help provide sophisticated data analysis for a broad range of target audiences, to further dsm-firmenich’s personalized nutrition strategy. Combined with dsm-firmenich’s breadth of expertise in nutrition science, products and solutions, the acquisition will allow to gain unique consumer insights, as well as develop the next generation of personalized nutrition solutions.

The insights provided through AVA will also allow brand owners to target a wider range of health areas, including lifestyle-related diseases, maternal health, healthy aging and sports performance. The new platform can be fully customized to a wide variety of uses, and is currently available in the US and Europe, with further expansion plans throughout dsm-firmenich’s global network.

Effectively combining behavior-change science and AI-steered coaching

One of the key challenges facing consumers following any nutritional solution or program is the embedding of new, healthy behaviors into daily routines. By applying behavior-change science and providing access to live, AI-enabled expert coaching, the AVA platform provides a much higher level of consumer engagement. Programs based on personalized data and goals can therefore help increase consumer retention, resulting in improved health benefit outcomes for individuals.

In addition, AVA’s application of advanced artificial intelligence technology can further help solve some of the most challenging aspects of personalized nutrition, such as adaptive meal and supplementation planning and scalable expert coaching. The digital platform can also be used by innovation teams to implement discrete customer projects where there is a need to translate information about an individual into health advice and nutritional solutions.

Leading the way in personalized nutrition

AVA brings extensive expertise in natural language processing and machine learning, in addition to a broad clinical nutrition knowledge base, thanks to their coaching network of certified nutritionists. This level of knowledge allows brand owners to adapt the new digital platform to suit a diverse range of commercial applications in the field of personalized nutrition.

“Together, dsm-firmenich and AVA will deliver a new service model in the growing area of personalized nutrition,” comments Nate Matusheski, Ph.D., Lead Scientist, Personalized Nutrition at dsm-firmenich. “Having a digital partner that speaks the language of nutrition will allow dsm-firmenich to support customers in quickly and efficiently navigate the complexities associated with developing a personalized nutrition approach.”

Ultimately, the development of a new program will help accelerate products and solutions to market, as well as lower the total cost of ownership for brands looking to develop a personalized nutrition offering for their consumers.