Sustainable food innovation process integrating consumer needs, environmental impacts and company constraints

Abstract :

In a context of societal and environmental transition for sustainable development, agri-food companies must innovate with new constraints. However, research has not yet considered the simultaneous meeting of two approaches to product development, the "consumer-led" approach and the environment-led, "eco-innovation" approach to food innovation. A five-stage innovation process (ideation, conceptualization, development, validation, launch) that mobilizes various tools for integrating consumers, the environment, and decision support, has been developed in a research-intervention case to address this gap. The work has shown that consumers can be effectively integrated from the ideation stage through a qualitative method, the focus group, and can co-create products in an iterative way. The Life Cycle Assessment tool chosen to integrate the environmental dimension and modularized for the environmental evaluation of pre-concepts and prototypes, showed limitations (complexity, lack of data), reducing the impact of our proposal on the company's decisions during the process. A multi-criteria and scalable decision-support tool has made it possible to guide decisions on the three dimensions of performance: market, feasibility, and environment. Finally, this thesis provides perspectives for agri-food companies by proposing operational tools and future research perspectives that promote sustainable innovation.

Co-encadrement :

Pierre Picouet, Isabelle Maître et Ronan Symoneaux

Jury :

• Anne SAINT-EVE (AgroParisTech) – rapporteur
• Vincent BOLY (ENSGSI Nancy) – rapporteur
• Jean Marc FERRANDI (Oniris)
• Catherine RENARD (INRAE)
• Pierre PICOUET (ESA)
• Isabelle MAITRE (ESA)