Trade-off hacking: Have the cake and eat it too? Turning competing interests into win-wins in data-driven food technology

<ns3:p>Data-driven innovations in the food sector, from personalised nutrition to supply chain tracking, promise clear benefits but introduce complex trade-offs between competing interests such as personalisation and privacy, or performance and explainability. These tensions can hinder responsible innovation if addressed as zero-sum conflicts. This paper introduces the concept of “Trade-off Hacking”, a user-centric technology design approach that reframes competing interests as opportunities for innovation striving for win-win outcomes. The concept is used as an analytical device to examine the practices of eight pilot projects funded by the Horizon Europe project “DRG4FOOD”. Trough analysis of these real-world food tech pilots, this study moves beyond merely acknowledging trade-offs to identifying reproducible design patterns that rebalance, or even resolve them. The analysis reveals a spectrum of strategies to achieve this, from governance-based user controls and privacy-preserving architectures to co-design methodologies. The paper groups these solutions into two main categories: technology-driven resolutions, which use e.g. architectural or cryptographic methods to influence a trade-off, and cooperation-driven resolutions, which reframe value tensions as socio-technical negotiations.</ns3:p>