Safefood uses recipes as a simple but powerful way to share advice about healthy eating and food safety. Through a novel collaboration with the NPCFC technologists, these typical home-cooked dishes were prepared for and tasted by the public to ensure they hit the mark for ease of preparation, flavour and affordability
Challenge: Making Healthy Recipes Work for Novice Cooks
Safefood uses recipes as a key vehicle to communicate healthy-eating and food-safety guidance. Because recipes drive traffic to the Safefood website, they must work in real kitchens: be healthy, tasty, simple to prepare, and use affordable, readily available ingredients. The aim is that people will return to the site, adopting healthier cooking habits. This project began a process of evaluating Safefood’s recipes with the public on both taste and practical food-preparation criteria.
Solution: Real-World Recipe Testing with Consumers
A selection of typical home-cooked dishes suitable for novice cooks was tested and, where needed, reformulated (nutritional analysis, sensory experience and cost checks informed the changes). To replicate an in-home experience, an experienced chef demonstrated each recipe and prepared the dishes in a dedicated demonstration auditorium at the BIA Innovator campus. Specially recruited consumers then participated in sensory trials, providing structured feedback on both ease of preparation and sensory qualities. This approach captured real-world reactions to the recipes and identified areas for improvement.
Impact: Enhancing Recipe Accessibility for Healthier Eating
The research gave Safefood practical insights on how to make its recipes more accessible to novice cooks, from ingredient choices and preparation steps to sensory appeal. These findings support Safefood’s wider goal of empowering consumers with the knowledge and tools to eat safely and healthily and align with the “Building a healthier food environment” campaign launched in 2024. The collaboration between NPCFC sensory and NPD technologists and the BIA Innovator facilities demonstrated an efficient, consumer-centred method for refining recipe content that can scale across Safefood’s digital offerings.
