Cool snacks: A cross-disciplinary approach to healthier snacks for adolescents

•Developing healthy snacks requires insight into habits, motives and situations.•Snacks for adolescents need to be adapted to gender and situation.•Snacks for adolescents should be varied in taste/texture, and good for socialization.•Development of healthy snacks living up to adolescents' demands is possible.•Fruits and vegetables are a good basis for healthy snacks for adolescents.

Young people snack and their snacking habits are not always healthy. We address the questions whether it is possible to develop a new snack product that adolescents will find attractive, even though it is based on ingredients as healthy as fruits and vegetables, and we argue that developing such a product requires an interdisciplinary effort where researchers with backgrounds in psychology, anthropology, media science, philosophy, sensory science and food science join forces. We present the COOL SNACKS project, where such a blend of competences was used first to obtain thorough insight into young people's snacking behaviour and then to develop and test new, healthier snacking solutions. These new snacking solutions were tested and found to be favourably accepted by young people. The paper therefore provides a proof of principle that the development of snacks that are both healthy and attractive to adolescents is possible if based on an interdisciplinary, concerted effort.