5 May – How can we encourage people across Europe to adopt eating habits that benefit their health and the environment? Shifting towards more healthy and sustainable diets is a pressing societal challenge; yet the scientific knowledge needed to support this transition often remains out of reach. Developed as part of SWITCH, a four-year Horizon Europe initiative bringing together 21 partners across 8 countries, the Digital Hub Experience is a research-led digital platform designed by the EPFL+ECAL Lab to bridge this gap. By making complex scientific knowledge accessible to citizens, chefs, and policymakers alike, it turns research into a resource for real-world change.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Food systems are at the centre of some of the most complex environmental and health challenges of our era. What we eat, how it is produced, and how it reaches our plates has profound consequences for ecosystems, for public health, and for communities. SWITCH is a European research project built around the conviction that the transition towards more sustainable and healthy diets requires coordinated, inclusive, and science-based action. Funded by Horizon Europe, SWITCH brings together transdisciplinary expertise spanning social and environmental sciences, nutrition, design research, and informatics. Its work is practically grounded in six regional Food Hubs across Europe, living laboratories where researchers, farmers, chefs, educators, and policymakers work side by side on the ground to make sustainable food transitions a reality.
The SWITCH project generates rich scientific knowledge such as environmental indicators from UNICAMP, health impact models by Chalmers, food system by INRAE, and behavioural insights from University of Wageningen. But the generation of knowledge is only part of the challenge. A persistent problem in research on dietary change is the gap between the complexity of scientific outputs and the capacity of non-specialist audiences to engage with them meaningfully. Technical reports, indicator databases, and research frameworks can create real barriers to adoption and transformation. This is where design research plays a role. Within the SWITCH consortium led by the CMCC Foundation, the EPFL+ECAL Lab’s work is built around this exact challenge: how do we translate scientific data into experiences that are accessible, engaging, and actionable, not only for experts, but for citizens navigating food choices, for chefs rethinking menus, and for policymakers designing interventions?
The Digital Hub Experience, a unified digital platform connecting food system stakeholders across the six European regional hubs, and developed in collaboration with the digital agency Antistatique, is the EPFL+ECAL Lab’s response to these questions. Its development followed a research-led process spanning multiple stages and involving multiple stakeholders including citizens, professional chefs and policymakers. Through contextual inquiries and formal usability evaluations, a key insight emerged: what mattered most to each group was not access to tailored, audience-specific tools, but the ability to connect with one another around shared knowledge.
The resulting platform is organised around three interconnected journeys, each designed for a different relationship with the food system – yet open to all. Citizens can discover hub-curated recipes, local stories, events and resources. Chefs and food professionals gain visibility through Hub Partner profiles, linking their work to the communities they are part of. An Insights section opens the project’s broader evidence base – hub activity data, learnings from across Europe, connections to related initiatives – to anyone looking to understand or apply the findings in new contexts. The platform also serves as an experimental environment for ongoing research, including work on AI-driven conversational tools to promote food literacy and adaptive interfaces across different cultural contexts.
The Digital Hub Experience is now live across all six SWITCH Food Hubs, putting four years of transdisciplinary research within reach of the citizens, chefs, and policymakers who are driving change across Europe. Discover the platform on switchdiet.app
Learn more about the project on switchdiet.eu
Image © EPFL+ECAL Lab