2026 Research for Innovative Food Policy Fund recipients

The Global Food Research Program, with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, is pleased to announce the inaugural recipients of the Research for Innovative Food Policy Fund. These six projects were awarded up to $100,000 USD or research focused on innovative approaches to move the needle on policy design for healthy food environments. Learn more about these projects below:

Data governance as a tool for healthier digital food environments: testing regulatory approaches to reduce children’s exposure to ultra-processed food marketing setting

The World Health Organization identifies persuasive power and frequency of exposure as the main dimensions by which marketing influences children. Child-directed food marketing is increasingly personalized, algorithm-driven, and difficult to regulate. Current food marketing policies focus on restricting advertising content and exposure but lack proper data governance on how children’s personal data is collected and used to target marketing in the first place.

A study led by Dr. Fernanda Mediano Stolze at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, Chile will audit how children’s data is currently used for ultra-processed food marketing, design a child-focused data governance regulatory package, model impacts of four regulatory scenarios, and experimentally test their effects on adolescents aged 13-15 years, who have the greatest exposure to digital food marketing.

“I’m excited to find out what social media actually shows adolescents,” says Mediano. “Our audit will measure how much ultra-processed food advertising, influencer content, and user-generated content reaches them, compared with adults, and how that varies by sex, interests, and location. From there, we’ll simulate exposure under different data protection scenarios to design a governance package of enforceable restrictions on profiling, targeted advertising, and algorithmic recommendation to complement ultra-processed food marketing restrictions.” 

Developing a nutrition-sensitive municipal governance model for informal street food vending in South Africa

South Africa, like many low-and middle-income countries, is experiencing a double burden of malnutrition where persistent undernutrition and rising overweight and obesity are both significant  public health concerns. Chronic hunger affects approximately seven million people in South Africa. Meanwhile, 21 million South Africans have overweight or obesity.

The food and beverage industry, supermarkets, and fast-food restaurants play a significant role in food environments that shape what people eat and their nutrition and health outcomes. Amid this, informal markets, such as street food vending businesses, are often overlooked by policy and governance. While municipal bylaws regulate hygiene, licensing, and trading locations, they rarely address nutritional quality. Informal food markets are a valuable source of food access and income, particularly in low-income communities, however these businesses often provide ultra-processed, and nutrient-poor foods.

Drs. Micheal Kofi Boachie and Sameera Mahomedy from PRICELESS SA and colleagues from the South African Medical Research Council seek to design and model a governance structure that will improve the informal food market environment while also maintaining food accessibility for the communities they serve. In collaboration with informal food vendors, vendor organizations, municipal officials, and experts in nutrition and public health law, their team will co-design a nutrition-focused governance framework followed by a feasibility assessment that will identify opportunities, constraints, and institutional requirements for implementing the framework.

“What excites me most is the potential to rethink how we create healthier food environments by bringing the informal food sector into the conversation,” said Mahomedy. “We hope this research will show that healthier food environments and protecting livelihoods do not have to be competing goals, and that practical, locally grounded approaches can achieve both.” 

Adapting tobacco control governance mechanisms to protect nutrition and food environment policies from ultra-processed food industry interference

The World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control was innovative in that it specifically limited tobacco industry influence in regulatory policy development. By contrast, food industry frequently influences food policy development by pushing for weaker adoption and implementation frameworks via lobbying, political financing, and litigation. Despite growing evidence of the food industry’s sway, regulatory instruments that protect food policy development from influence remain limited.

In a first of its kind study, a team lead by Dr. Paz Cavada Robert at the University of Chile’s Institute of Nutrition and Food Technology will develope a regulatory instrument for industry-government interactions, conflict-of-interest guidelines, and a specialized ultra-processed food lobbying registry based on the governance principles of the WHO Frame Convention on Tobacco Control.

“I am excited about the opportunity to monitor corporate political activity, understand which institutional mechanisms and gaps in regulatory frameworks facilitate its influence, and identify safeguards that could contribute to more transparent and balanced decision-making,” said Cavada Robert. “I hope our work can provide useful evidence on how to strengthen transparency, accountability, and conflict-of-interest safeguards in food policymaking.” 

Corrective fiscal policy to limit incentives for unhealthy food marketing

In many countries, food and beverage companies can deduct marketing expenses from their taxable income, even if their marketing encourages consumption of unhealthy foods that undermine public health and environmental sustainability. Allowing tax write-offs for advertising leads to governments implicitly subsidizing unhealthy food marketing. Despite evidence of health harm, very few countries have meaningful restrictions on unhealthy food advertising, or if they do, restrictions focus only on single settings, such as schools, or daytime television channels. Comprehensive marketing restrictions on tobacco companies, by contrast, have led to reductions in consumption of tobacco products, and carbon taxes on high-emitting industries have reduced emissions by 5–15%.

A team of researchers from Australia and India aims to develop corrective a fiscal policy that avoids incentivizing unhealthy food marketing. The project, led by Dr. Navoda Liyana Pathirana from the Deakin Centre for Global Preventive Health and Nutrition, aims to evaluate the feasibility, design, and public and planetary health impacts of a policy which restricts corporate tax deductions on marketing expenditures for unhealthy foods. This study will be the first to assess corrective fiscal policy across all media settings in both high- and low-income countries.

“What excites me most about this project is its potential to quantify, for the first time, the health and environmental benefits of removing tax incentives for unhealthy food marketing,” said Liyana Pathirana. “We hope that by generating evidence on this often-overlooked fiscal policy, we lay the foundation to advocate for governments to enact such fiscal policies to strengthen regulations on unhealthy food marketing, leading to reduced unhealthy food marketing and creating healthier food environments for both people and the planet.”

Advancing children’s right to healthy diets through market-based food redistribution

In 2023, Mexico reformed the General Education Law to ban in-school sales of pre-packaged foods and beverages containing excess nutrients of health concern; however, structural challenges persist where school cooperatives depend on the sale of ultra-processed products and childhood obesity has continued to rise over the past three decades. Mexico’s 2024 National Health and Nutrition Survey revealed that 37% of school-aged children and 40% of adolescents have overweight or obesity. Meanwhile, Mexico generated approximately 8.9 million metric tons of food loss and waste at food distribution and retail centers in 2022.

In 2024, Mexico enacted the General Law on Adequate and Sustainable Food (LGAAS) which mandates food waste reduction and affirms children’s right to adequate food. This law creates a policy window for action, which Dr. Lilia Pedraza’s research team from the National Institute of Public Health of Mexico aims to explore. Their study will combine implementation science and impact evaluation design over the course of 18 months in Mexico City and Morelos, Mexico.

Their team will identify schools and nearby markets and, after interviewing multiple stakeholders, will co-design and pilot a food-safe redistribution system prioritizing whole foods that will operate over a 16 weeks. After the pilot, they will evaluate changes in the school food environment and in children’s fruit and vegetable intake. “I hope this intervention helps create environments where eating natural, fresh food is the norm for children and adolescents, not a privilege,” says Pedraza. “And I hope this work encourages cross-sector collaboration and revalues local, seasonal foods as part of children’s cultural identity.” 

Testing an informal food system inclusion framework for healthier urban food environments, equity and visibility of small-scale fisheries in Lagos, Nigeria

For policymakers and advocates to understand and tackle challenges in the food environment and healthy food access, they must see and compare patterns in the data. Formal retail store and packaged food sales are relatively easy to capture, but data from informal supply chains are much more difficult.

In Lagos, Nigeria, fish caught, processed, and sold through informal markets supply a valuable source of affordable, animal-based food access for low-income households, but these markets are only weakly represented in food environment monitoring and are not consistently considered in planning or policy design. Nigeria considers fisheries, food and nutrition security, women’s livelihoods, and monitoring and evaluation on the national agenda but the absence of a mechanism that can track informal food systems creates a vital gap in the evidence base.

A multinational research team co-led by Kristina Sokourenko, MPP (Cornell University) and Drs. Olutayo Adeyemi (University of Ibadan), and AyoJesutomi Abiodun-Solanke (the Federal College of Fisheries and Marine Technology) seek to develop an Informal Food System Inclusion framework to address this gap. They aim to see whether this framework can improve how governments measure and govern access to healthy food in urban areas where most nutrient-dense and minimally processed foods move predominantly through informal food systems.

They will work with relevant institutions using existing food environment planning tools to identify where informal fish markets are omitted and co-design an inclusion framework with local partners and policymakers. They will then gather data from waterfront markets on several measures such as availability, price, and household reliance and compare those with the framework-adjusted measurements. Finally, their team will work with administrators and technical stakeholders to identify future needs that could support the new framework’s adoption.

“I hope this innovation helps expand what counts as food policy,” said Sokourenko. “Too often, healthy food environment work focuses on regulating unhealthy products after they have already become dominant. That is important, but it is not enough. I hope our work can help to shift food policy toward protecting the value chains that make healthy foods available in the first place. This means not only discouraging unhealthy products, but recognizing and strengthening the people, places, and markets that keep fresh foods within reach.”