CI Webinar Series: Heribert Watzke, PhD
Unlocking the Nutritional Universe for Food Innovations
Heribert Watzke, PhD
Dr. Phil. Watzke Heribert Consulting
Innovation is all about giving your customer/consumer more choices. The same is valid for food innovations where it is not desirable to eat more but to eat variant. Food innovations have pushed the envelope of sensory impact and convenience for the last 50 years. A classical prolongation of that trend is “Chef Watson”, IBM’s artificial intelligence program that composes conveniently new recipes with surprising flavors and textures.
But food has more than these two dimensions. They can be aggregated in the C.H.E.F.S. principles of foods, where the acronym stays for convenience, health, epicurean, function, and sustainability. To unfold the full potential of food innovations, it is necessary to develop tools that unlock the relations between these dimensions and their innovation space.
Over the last years, the impact of foods on health has acquired prominence driven by biomedical research. The importance has been amplified by consumer trends of eating healthy and naturally. But results and insights of nutrition science are not easily translated into consumer language. The multitude of new food fads and myth bears witness of the half-digested processing of nutrition knowledge by the public.
The seminar will introduce a novel nutritional concept, the “Nutrition Balance Concept” (NBC), permitting the development of tools that unlock nutritional knowledge for innovations on the basis of the interconnections of the C.H.E.F.S. principles. NBC describes by dimensionless indices ingredients, meals and eating patterns defining “fingerprints” of composite foods. Their mathematical properties provide feedback to food choices and their nutritional impacts. These fingerprints of foods can be associated with other parameters like environmental indicators giving simultaneously the ramification of food choice on nutritional quality and environmental cost of diets.
Examples from analysis of family diets and eating pattern in countries will illustrate the basic working of NBC. Applying NBC to environmental impact of foods will show that food choice can improve both simultaneously.
About the speaker
Heribert Watzke is a graduate of the Karl-Franzens University of Graz, Austria, with a PhD in chemistry. He graduated after studies in chemistry, experimental physics, history and philosophy. After a PostDoc position at the Syracuse University, New York, USA working on artificial photosynthesis (solar energy conversion), Dr. Watzke took a research and teaching position at the Polymer Institute (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETHZ) in Zürich, Switzerland. At ETHZ, his research focused on nanocolloid interactions and nano-composite materials.
Heribert joined Nestlé at the Nestlé Research Center, Lausanne, Switzerland as colloid scientist in 1993, taking consecutively the positions of Head of Food Structure and Material Science group and Head of Food Science and Technology Department. He held the latter position for 9 years leading the 150 member strong department in its development of various innovations for the company. In 2007 he changed to a new position working for the CTO as Senior Group Expert (Research Fellow Nestlé Research) focusing on emerging & novel technologies holding the position of an Assistant Vice President.