Undergraduate student presents at the NABEC 2023 conference
August 2, 2023
Miss Marie-Anne Dessureault made a poster presentation at the Northeast Agricultural / Biological Engineering Conference
at the University of Guelph between July 31 and August 2, 2023.
Miss Dessureault presented on a Dashboard for Improving
a Sustainable Healthy Diet, which she had worked on during her summer internship.
In her presentation, Miss Dessureault shared current trends in consumer need and demand for
the food products they purchase or consume be produced in an environmentally sustainable manner.
This background served as the foundation for her project, which focused on developing a digital simulator
that leverages environmental and health benefits to enhance consumer health while meeting consumers sustainability goals.
Her presentation drew much as attention as many of the participants in the conference were unfamiliar with
the research space. She went further to explain the different techniques, such as the Health Star Rating ,
Food Compass Score, HENI score and environmental sustainability, which were indices she adopted to provide
the nutritional performance of the selected meals.
To communicate to the audience and user the technology she is working on,
Miss Dessurealt shared her approach of translating these indices to color-coded indices
(the traffic light model). In measuring the environmental sustainability of meals, Miss shared
how she had applied ReCiPe 2016 and World 2010 (H) impact assessment and normalization methods.
She also translated these into monetary equivalence using Environmental Pricing and MMG methods.
She also shared a QR code to the prototype and the reference paper she had adopted to develop this project.
In concluding her presentation, she Acknowledged the Sustainable Food System Initiative by the Danone Institute
North America and highlighted that all the results of this project would be tested on cafeterias at the Macdonald
Campus and looks forward to getting more cafeterias on the downtown campus to test this technology.