Alícia Index: Optimizing data, design, and impact for food innovation

Fundació Alícia works with a clear mission: to help everyone eat better, understanding that “everyone” means each individual, as food needs vary depending on age, health status, social context, life stage, and circumstances of consumption. 

And "eating better” means healthier, more sustainable and good; it cannot be addressed through a single criterion. Food needs to be understood as a holistic, 360-degree approach that allows the development of food solutions that are truly viable, acceptable, and impactful. 

As a result of years of work and research, the Alícia Index was developed as an assessment and innovation tool designed to measure and evaluate the suitability of a food-related product, meal, service, or project in relation to its target audience and context of use. The Index integrates three key dimensions: 

• Healthy: safe, sufficient, and balanced

• Sustainable: ecological, economic, and practical

• Good: ethical, meaningful, and pleasurable

Rather than functioning as a binary label or rating, the Alícia Index operates as a “thermometer”, helping identify strengths, areas for improvement, and priorities for action, as well as supporting design, formulation, or reformulation processes and measuring progress over time. 

For each dimension, the Alícia Index is defined through specific concepts, criteria, and guiding questions that structure the evaluation process. This allows scores to be assigned in a consistent and quantifiable way, reducing subjectivity while enabling comparison and progress tracking over time. Given the contextual nature of food and eating, a degree of expert judgment remains, which this challenge aims to further refine. 

Objectives and requirements 

We aim to collaborate with innovation partners to evolve the Alícia Index and optimize its digital tool in order to: 

• Reduce subjectivity and improve consistency across evaluations. 

• Extract patterns and insights from the data generated by the Index. 

• Improve and standardize scoring and comparability. 

• Enhance result interpretation, making outputs clearer, visual, and actionable for decision-making. 

• Optimize the user interface and user experience (UI/UX) to make the tool more intuitive, efficient, and scalable for professional use. 

Ultimately, the goal is to evolve the Alícia Index into a more scalable, decision-supportive digital tool that helps organizations develop food solutions that are healthier, more sustainable, and better to make people eat better.  

We are seeking startups, technology providers, or innovation partners with experience in one or more of the following areas: 

• Data analysis, AI, decision-support systems, or scoring models. 

• UX/UI design for professional digital tools. 

• Data visualization and insight communication. 

• Multidimensional evaluation methodologies.