WUR and HAS Green Academy chart barriers and opportunities to healthy, sustainable diets
Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and HAS Green Academy have published a new Roadmap and Opportunities Map outlining how the Netherlands can accelerate the transition to healthier and more sustainable food choices. Commissioned by TKI Agri&Food, together with TKI Horticulture & Starting Materials, the publication “Making Impact Together” identifies the structural obstacles that continue to hinder progress – and the interventions needed to reshape food environments so that sustainable and healthy options become the norm rather than the exception.
The central question driving the work is straightforward: how can sustainable and healthy food become commonplace for everyone? According to the research team, the answer lies not in targeting individual behaviour alone, but in redesigning the environments that shape daily food choices.
A response to gaps in the national innovation agenda
The project began with a clear observation: within the Knowledge and Innovation Agenda (KIA) Mission 4D, relatively few initiatives focus on healthy food environments or long‑term consumer behaviour. Yet these are precisely the areas where systemic impact is possible. The researchers argue that as long as the food environment continues to promote unhealthy and unsustainable options – through pricing, availability, marketing and convenience – behaviour‑focused interventions will struggle to deliver meaningful change.
Four lines of action to move from direction to acceleration
The Roadmap and Opportunities Map organises short‑, medium‑ and long‑term opportunities along four interconnected lines:
- Ownership – clarifying who is responsible for what, and ensuring mandates are aligned with national ambitions.
- Collaboration – shifting from isolated projects to coordinated, reinforcing programmes.
- Instruments – adapting funding, regulation and policy tools to support multidisciplinary work and faster implementation.
- Knowledge development – ensuring insights flow through to practice, and that scaling is considered from the outset.
The authors emphasise that the transition will only accelerate when projects are designed to strengthen one another, when knowledge is actively transferred into application, and when implementation is treated as a core component rather than an afterthought.
Five recommendations to unlock progress
To move from analysis to action, the publication sets out five concrete recommendations:
- Create a national strategic food agenda with clear roles, responsibilities and mechanisms for implementation and scaling.
- Mandate a single coordinating body to connect health and sustainability agendas, with representation from ministries, knowledge institutions, industry and financiers.
- Develop long‑term food policy, potentially through dedicated food legislation, including options such as tax incentives and regulatory measures.
- Align funding organisations so that projects can build on one another through thematic programming.
- Make instruments more flexible to remove barriers to multidisciplinary collaboration and speed up the delivery of usable outputs.
Next steps toward a strategic food agenda
A follow‑up to the REK project is already being explored. A recent joint meeting between the REK team, the Roadmap for Nutrition, Health and Environment, and other stakeholders focused on shaping next steps – particularly the development of a strategic food agenda that explicitly addresses consumer behaviour and the food environment.
Call to action
TKI Agri&Food is calling on public and private partners, knowledge institutions and financiers to adopt the Roadmap and Opportunities Map as a shared starting point. The message is clear: explicit ownership, programmatic collaboration and investment in implementation are essential to creating the coherence and continuity required to make sustainable and healthy choices structurally easier.
The publication was developed by Wageningen Food & Biobased Research, Wageningen Social & Economic Research and HAS Green Academy, and financed by TKI Agri&Food and TKI Horticulture & Starting Materials.
