The Plymouth element of the project, which will directly receive around £600,000 funding, will build on Dr Pettinger’s previous work examining how food poverty is impacting vulnerable people across the city.

This has included research in tandem with disadvantaged groups and community initiatives, and resulted in a film – Food: On the Margins in Plymouth, produced with media company Fotonow CIC thanks to funding from the Sustainable Earth Institute's Creative Associates programme – designed to shed light on the impact of food poverty within the city of Plymouth.

For the new project, she will be using her expertise in public health nutrition as part of a local and national benchmarking exercise to understand the diets of disadvantaged communities.

She will then also work with the Food Plymouth CIC to establish a team of community food researchers, whose work will include helping industry partners to improve the content healthiness and sustainability of food products.

As the project progresses, Dr Pettinger will also help to evaluate the impact of new products on choice and public health and then develop new community food policies.

Away from Plymouth, the project will focus on sharing knowledge and learning from working with people from a variety of disadvantaged communities (Whitley, Berkshire; Brighton and Hove, West Sussex; Tower Hamlets, London) as well as small and large food businesses and policy makers.

Communities will co-create policies to prevent food loss from 'mainstream' supply chains, and identify where increased sustainable production of primary food ingredients is needed.