Michelle Morris is Professor of Data Science for Food in the School of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Leeds and a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK national institute for data science and artificial intelligence in London. She leads the interdisciplinary Nutrition and Lifestyle Analytics team which uses novel forms of data, including supermarket transaction records from a number of UK supermarkets, for research into lifestyle behaviours and health. She is a Co-Director at the ESRC funded Consumer Data Research Centre and academic lead on the Priority Places for Food Index used in the Which? Affordable Food For All campaign. Michelle leads the evaluation of the IGD funded Healthy and Sustainable diets programme.

Michelle is an investigator at the UKRI funded UK Transforming Food Systems grants FIO Food and DIO Food where she leads FIO Food Work Package 2, which aims to utilise supermarket transactions and data science to understand the health and sustainability of population diet at scale and DIO Food Work Package 6, which aims to analyse population-level supermarket transaction data to evaluate the impacts of High Fat Sugar and Salt legislation.

Talk title:
The interplay of health, environmental sustainability and cost in supermarket food purchase data.

Description:
In this talk Michelle will first introduce the value of supermarket consumer purchase data as a lens for understanding dietary behaviours from the perspectives of health, environmental sustainability and cost before discussing the process of applying health and environmental sustainability metrics at scale to a retail product dataset. Michelle will then share findings demonstrating the interplay of these three important metrics as they present within consumer purchase data from a cohort of Sainsbury’s shoppers. To finish, Michelle will share how these data and methods can be used in the evaluation of nutrition policy at scale and how we should consider dietary inequalities within these data.