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

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". This study applies an exploratory multiple-case study design to eight DRG4FOOD pilots selected through two Horizon Europe open calls (164 admissible proposals; 8 funded). Data sources included pilot applications, implementation documents, and project-level monitoring material generated during the incubation period. Analysis followed two steps: cross-case identification of recurring trade-offs; and pattern identification of resolution strategies into two emerging categories. 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 focuses on three trade-offs (privacy/personalisation, performance/explainability, security/user experience) because these were the most recurrent and comparable across pilots; other tensions are discussed as out-of-scope for the primary framework. The analysis reveals a spectrum of strategies to achieve a rebalancing or resolving, 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.