Dr. Athanasios Polyportis has been awarded an NWO SSH Open Competition XS grant for the project "From Barriers to Bites: Ultra-Brief Tailored Messages for Plant-Based Food Choices". The 12-month project runs from June 2026 and examines how everyday barriers to plant-based eating can be translated into short, tailored messages that support more sustainable food choices.
Campaigns encouraging sustainable eating often use general tips, even though people face very different barriers in everyday food choices. Price, time, cooking skills, planning, taste preferences and expectations about how filling a meal will be can all shape whether someone chooses a plant-based option.
The NWO XS project "From Barriers to Bites: Ultra-Brief Tailored Messages for Plant-Based Food Choices" investigates whether short, barrier-specific messages can better support plant-based choices than generic sustainability tips. The project will first collect insights from Dutch adults about barriers in daily food contexts, such as meals, shopping and food storage. Using machine-learning text clustering, combined with human review and participant validation, these insights will be used to develop a Barrier Lexicon and a set of ultra-brief tailored messages.
The messages will then be tested in an experiment using a canteen task. The project will produce open, practitioner-oriented outputs, including the tailored messages and a decision chart linking common barriers to suitable messages. These outputs are intended to support researchers, public health communicators, food-service professionals and campaign designers working to encourage healthier and more sustainable food choices.
- Researcher
