A national partnership of academics, practitioners, physicians, NGOs, universities, and hospitals — investigating how Canadian institutions can align with Canada’s Food Guide.
What is FIN?
Funded by a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (2024–2026), the Food Impact Network (FIN) was established to create a national partnership of academics, practitioners, physicians, NGO’s, institutions such as Universities and Hospitals, to investigate the opportunities and the challenges of aligning Canadian institutions, such as Universities and Hospitals and food systems with Canada’s Food Guide.
In the FIN 1.0 we have focused on four work bundles (WB1-4) that capitalized on the excellent work of specialists from cross-sector and interdisciplinary teams. In the last 3 years, these four work bundles have achieved massive momentum and created a strong extensively researched foundation for expanding this work to all institutions across Canada in FIN 2.0.
The FIN team and partner sites have solidified the tools and strategies to guide institution dining services towards implementing planetary health menus and the Canadian food guide, providing consumers better tasting, healthier, and environmentally sustainable food options while preserving their autonomy.
Four Research Teams
Food Environments & Culinary Training
WB 1 has analyzed partner site food environments, trained culinary staff in plant-forward dishes, altered menu items to increase popularity and consumer uptake.
Patient Satisfaction & Food Waste
WB 2 has assessed patients’ satisfaction with pre- and post- plant-forward meal swaps at partner sites, conducted a visual plate waste audit to calculate food waste pre and post plant-forward meal swaps.
Nutritional, Economic & Policy Impact
WB 3 has gathered and analyzed pre- and post- plant-forward menu swap data from partner sites to understand the nutritional and economic impact of the menu transition at the partner sites, explored a potential modeling approach for a Canada-wide policy model to understand the economic impact of diet transition, and prepared policy briefs for the social, health and environmental impacts of plant based diets.
Misinformation & Barrier Research
WB 4 has conducted research on industry spread misinformation and commonly narratives strategically used to deny or diminish the benefits of plant-forward food systems, the barriers to their adoption and their effrects, as well as strategies to overcome these barriers.
