#Healthy: smart digital food safety and nutrition communication strategies—a critical commentary

This paper explores how food safety and nutrition organisations can harness the power of search engines, games, apps, social media, and digital analytics tools to craft broad-reaching and engaging digital communications. We start with search engines, showing how organisations can identify popular food safety and nutrition queries, facilitating the creation of timely and in-demand content. To ensure this content is discoverable by search engines, we cover several non-technical aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO). We next explore the potential of games, apps, social media, and going viral for reaching and engaging the public, and how digital data-based tools can be used to optimise communications. Throughout, we draw on examples not only from Europe and North America, but also China. While we are enthusiastic about the benefits of digital communications, we recognise that they are not without their drawbacks and challenges. To help organisations evaluate whether a given digital approach is appropriate for their objectives, we end each section with a discussion of limitations. We conclude with a discussion of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the practical, philosophical, and policy challenges associated with communicating food safety and nutrition information digitally

What makes smartphone games successful in food information communication?

China’s annual Food Safety Publicity Week in June 2019 has, for the first time, included smartphone games in its activities. Food related governmental and non-governmental organizations liaised with Alipay (Alibaba’s payment application) launching a smartphone quiz-game with an unprecedented level of public engagement with food information (i.e., food safety, nutrition, and food science and technologies): 12 million participants and 1.7 billion instances of participation within 1 week. This example demonstrates the great potential of smartphone games, and more widely, digital tools, in food-related public education. Given the extent of misinformation among the public on food safety and nutrition issues, food scientists and organizations should be empowered to embrace emerging tools, such as smartphone games, in order to positively shape public opinions. To aid in this task, this commentary article analyzes the factors behind the unprecedented success of Alipay’s smartphone quiz-game during China’s Food Safety Publicity Week