Estimating dietary intake from grocery shopping data – a comparative validation of relevant indicators in Switzerland

In light of the globally increasing prevalence of diet-related chronic diseases, new scalable and non-invasive dietary monitoring techniques are urgently needed. Automatically collected digital receipts from loyalty cards hereby promise to serve as an objective and automatically traceable digital marker for individual food choice behavior and do not require users to manually log individual meal items. With the introduction of the General Data Privacy Regulation in the European Union, millions of consumers gained the right to access their shopping data in a machine-readable form, representing a historic chance to leverage shopping data for scalable monitoring of food choices. Multiple quantitative indicators for evaluating the nutritional quality of food shopping have been suggested, but so far, no comparison has validated the potential of these alternative indicators within a comparative setting. This manuscript thus represents the first study to compare the calibration capacity and to validate the discrimination potential of previously suggested food shopping quality indicators for the nutritional quality of shopped groceries, including the Food Standards Agency Nutrient Profiling System Dietary Index (FSA-NPS DI), Grocery Purchase Quality Index-2016 (GPQI), Healthy Eating Index-2015 (HEI-2015), Healthy Trolley Index (HETI) and Healthy Purchase Index (HPI), checking if any of them performs differently from the others. The hypothesis is that some food shopping quality indicators outperform the others in calibrating and discriminating individual actual dietary intake. To assess the indicators’ potentials, 89 eligible participants completed a validated food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) and donated their digital receipts from the loyalty card programs of the two leading Swiss grocery retailers, which represent 70% of the national grocery market. Compared to absolute food and nutrient intake, correlations between density based relative food and nutrient intake and food shopping data are stronger. The FSA-NPS DI has the best calibration and discrimination performance in classifying participants’ consumption of nutrients and food groups, and seems to be a superior indicator to estimate nutritional quality of a user’s diet based on digital receipts from grocery shopping in Switzerland

Business Model Design for Social Goods and Services in Developing Economies

Over the past decade there have been increasing calls for alternative ways of tackling poverty problems in developing economies. Rather than aid or charity approaches that have traditionally dominated this area, an alternative line of discussion around base-of-the-pyramid approaches has emerged which emphasizes the role of innovation and pro-poor entrepreneurship. These developments are consequently reshaping our current views on organizational sectors, vulnerable communities, and sources of value creation. Social businesses trailblazing these approaches however may find it difficult to provide customers at the very base of the economic pyramid with products and services in financially sustainable ways. Markets in remote rural areas are characterized by severe resource scarcity and pervasive institutional voids which make the pursuit of designing adequate value creation and appropriation mechanisms a challenging undertaking. Additionally, the commercialization of social goods further compounds these challenges, because hybrid missions demand the simultaneous generation of social and commercial value. In this dissertation, I aim to shed light on these issues and examine how successful social businesses have emerged in the context of the unfolding pro-poor informal water market. This setting lent itself especially well to such study because the lack of safe and affordable water access prominently affects severely poor and secluded geographies to which sustainable solutions in profit, non-profit or governmental form have not yet emerged; yet successful solutions by social businesses have. Building on the emergent research on social businesses, I suggest that these organizations established viable business ventures by designing a type of business model that caters to the needs of socially constrained base-of-the-pyramid communities despite the afore-mentioned managerial challenges. With a focus on theory development, I employ a multi-qualitative approach consisting of multiple case studies to develop a conceptual framework of these social business models and various propositions as to what may underpin their successful development. The empirical foundation for these elaborations consists of five studies. These highlight distinct value creation and appropriation mechanisms as well as capabilities that social businesses employ to circumnavigate resource scarcity and institutional voids. Consequently, focusing on the design of value creation and appropriation mechanisms, we gain deeper insights as to why some social businesses may outperform other organizations. The thesis concludes with implications for base-of-the-pyramid, social entrepreneurship and business model literature, as well as avenues for future research. Under det senaste decenniet har det blivit ökande uppmaningar till alternativa sätt att hantera fattigdomsproblem i utvecklingsekonomier. I stället för hjälp eller välgörenhetsmetoder som traditionellt dominerat detta område har en alternativ diskussionslinje kring “base-of-the-pyramid“ tillvägagångssätt uppstått som betonar rollen som innovation och fattig entreprenörskap. Denna utveckling förändrar följaktligen våranuvarande syn på organisationssektorer, utsatta samhällen och källor av värdeskapandet. Sociala företag som leder till dessa tillvägagångssätt kan dock ha svårt att tillhandahålla kunder på grunden av ekonomins pyramid med varor och tjänster på ekonomiskt hållbara sätt. Marknader i avlägsna landsbygdsområden kännetecknas av svår bristande resursbrist och genomgripande institutionella tomrum som gör strävan att utforma adekvata värdeskapande och värdefångande mekanismer ett utmanande gåtagande. Dessutom förvärrar kommersialiseringen av sociala varor dessa utmaningar, eftersom hybriduppdrag kräver samtidig generering av socialt och kommersiellt värde. I den här avhandlingen undersöker jag hur framgångsrika sociala företag har uppstått i samband med den outvecklade pro-fattiga vattenmarknaden. Jag föreslår att dessa sociala företag etablerat lönsamma affärsverksamheter genom att utforma en typ av affärsmodell som tillgodoser behoven hos socialt begränsade base-of-the-pyramid samhällen trots de ovan nämnda ledarskapsutmaningarna. Med fokus på teoriutveckling använder jag en mångsidig kvalitativ forskningsansats som består av flera fallstudier för att utveckla ett konceptuellt ramverk för dessa sociala affärsmodeller och olika förslag till vad som kan stödja deras framgångsrika utveckling. Den empiriska grunden för dessa utarbetningar består av fem studier. Dessa lyfter fram tydliga värdeskapande och värdefångande mekanismer samt kompetenser som sociala företag använder för att kringgå resursbrist och institutionella tomrum. Därför får vi djupare insikter om att vissa sociala företag kan överträffa andra organisationer, med fokus på utformningen av värdeskapande och värdefångande mekanismer

Estimating dietary intake from grocery shopping data— A comparative validation of relevant indicators in Switzerland

In light of the globally increasing prevalence of diet-related chronic diseases, new scalable and non-invasive dietary monitoring techniques are urgently needed. Automatically collected digital receipts from loyalty cards hereby promise to serve as an objective and automatically traceable digital marker for individual food choice behavior and do not require users to manually log individual meal items. With the introduction of the General Data Privacy Regulation in the European Union, millions of consumers gained the right to access their shopping data in a machine-readable form, representing a historic chance to leverage shopping data for scalable monitoring of food choices. Multiple quantitative indicators for evaluating the nutritional quality of food shopping have been suggested, but so far, no comparison has validated the potential of these alternative indicators within a comparative setting. This manuscript thus represents the first study to compare the calibration capacity and to validate the discrimination potential of previously suggested food shopping quality indicators for the nutritional quality of shopped groceries, including the Food Standards Agency Nutrient Profiling System Dietary Index (FSA-NPS DI), Grocery Purchase Quality Index-2016 (GPQI), Healthy Eating Index-2015 (HEI-2015), Healthy Trolley Index (HETI) and Healthy Purchase Index (HPI), checking if any of them performs differently from the others. The hypothesis is that some food shopping quality indicators outperform the others in calibrating and discriminating individual actual dietary intake. To assess the indicators’ potentials, 89 eligible participants completed a validated food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) and donated their digital receipts from the loyalty card programs of the two leading Swiss grocery retailers, which represent 70% of the national grocery market. Compared to absolute food and nutrient intake, correlations between density-based relative food and nutrient intake and food shopping data are stronger. The FSA-NPS DI has the best calibration and discrimination performance in classifying participants’ consumption of nutrients and food groups, and seems to be a superior indicator to estimate nutritional quality of a user’s diet based on digital receipts from grocery shopping in Switzerland.ISSN:2072-664