Ghislaine Narayanane – Head of the Oqali project for INRAE (testimonial from the dossier “Oqali: a food observatory to support public nutrition policy” -2021)
“I’m an agricultural engineer specialising in nutrition and have been in charge of steering the Oqali at INRAE since 2017. It’s a job that combines team management, scientific monitoring and strategic thinking. The Oqali has a threefold objective: to study changes in the quality of the range of processed products on offer, to monitor the roll-out of the Nutri-Score in mainland France, and to build up a reliable database of labelled information. Ministries can draw on this work to meet their nutrition and health objectives. How is the nutritional quality of hot sauces changing? Are consumer choices moving towards lower sugar levels in breakfast cereals? Is the use of additives in processed products declining? This data is also of interest to manufacturers, enabling them to monitor developments in their sector. Collecting and analysing packaging is essential to Oqali’s activities, but very time-consuming. They take up 2/7 of FTEs, to the detriment of research. The dematerialisation of this activity is therefore a key challenge.”
Testimonial from our thematic dossier
Thematic dossier
Oqali: a food observatory to support public nutrition policy
Described as a nutritional pathology by the World Health Organisation, obesity is a public health issue. Public policies have been tackling this issue through information and prevention strategies since the late 1990s. The need for knowledge and tools to share it has never been greater, and data on food and its transparency is a crucial issue. At the interface between science and public policy, INRAE and Anses have developed a food quality observatory called Oqali. Here’s a look at this tool for informing public policy on nutrition.
