Integrating Digital Food Nudges and Recommender Systems: Current Status and Future Directions

Recommender systems are widely regarded as effective tools for facilitating the discovery of relevant content. In the food domain, they help users find recipes, choose grocery products, and generate meal suggestions. While they address the challenge of choice overload, their direct influence on promoting healthier food choices remains limited. Digital nudges could further assist in guiding users toward healthier decisions, enhancing the accessibility and visibility of healthy options when integrated into a recommender system. This review examines to what extent food recommender systems have so far successfully incorporated digital nudges for healthy food promotion and which challenges still remain. We present a classification and analysis of various digital nudging strategies employed for this purpose, as well as opportunities for future research. We emphasize that various nudging techniques have the potential to support users in making healthier food choices within food recommender systems. Furthermore, user-centric evaluations represent the most effective approach for assessing the performance of these systems.