Oct. 16 is World Food Day, a world campaign to rejoice the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization 80 years ago, and to work toward a healthy, sustainable, food-secure future. Greater than 670 million people on the earth are facing hunger. Hundreds of thousands of others are facing rising obesity rates and struggle to get healthy food for correct nutrition.
World Food Day calls on not only world governments, but business, academia, the media, and even the youth to take motion to advertise resilient food systems and combat hunger. This yr, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Laboratory (J-WAFS) is spotlighting an MIT researcher who’s working toward this goal by studying food and water systems within the Global South.
J-WAFS seed grants provide funding to early-stage research projects which are unique to prior work. In an eleventh round of seed grant funding in 2025, 10 MIT faculty members received support to perform their cutting-edge water and food research. Ali Aouad PhD ’17, assistant professor of operations management on the MIT Sloan School of Management, was one in every of those grantees. “I had searched before joining MIT what form of research centers and initiatives were available that attempted to coalesce research on food systems,” Aouad says. “And so, I used to be very enthusiastic about J-WAFS.”
Aouad gathered more details about J-WAFS at the brand new faculty orientation session in August 2024, where he spoke to J-WAFS staff and learned in regards to the program’s grant opportunities for water and food research. Later that fall semester, he attended just a few J-WAFS seminars on agricultural economics and water resource management. That’s when Aouad knew that his project was perfectly aligned with the J-WAFS mission of securing humankind’s water and food.
Aouad’s seed project focuses on food subsidies. With a background in operations research and an interest in digital platforms, much of his work has centered on aligning supply-side operations with heterogeneous customer preferences. Past projects include ones on retail and matching systems. “I began considering that a majority of these demand-driven approaches could also be also very relevant to essential social challenges, particularly as they relate to food security,” Aouad says. Before starting his PhD at MIT, Aouad worked on projects that checked out subsidies for smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries. “I feel behind my mind, I’ve all the time been fascinated by trying to resolve these issues,” he noted.
His seed grant project, Optimal subsidy design: Application to food assistance programs, goals to leverage data on preferences and buying habits from local grocery stores in India to tell food assistance policy and optimize the design of subsidies. Typical data collection systems, like point-of-sales, usually are not as available in India’s local groceries, making any such data hard to come back by for low-income individuals. “Mom-and-pop stores are extremely essential last-mile operators relating to nutrition,” he explains.
For this project, the research team gave local grocers point-of-sale scanners to trace purchasing habits. “We aim to develop an algorithm that converts these transactions into some type of ‘revelation’ of the individuals’ latent preferences,” says Aouad. “As such, we are able to model and optimize the food assistance programs — how much variety and suppleness is obtainable, taking into consideration the expected demand uptake.” He continues, “now, in fact, our ability to reply detailed design questions [across various products and prices] is determined by the standard of our inference from the information, and so that is where we want more sophisticated and robust algorithms.”
Following the information collection and model development, the ultimate goal of this research is to tell policy surrounding food assistance programs through an “optimization approach.” Aouad describes the complexities of using optimization to guide policy. “Policies are sometimes informed by domain expertise, legacy systems, or political deliberation. Loads of researchers construct rigorous evidence to tell food policy, nevertheless it’s fair to say that the form of approach that I’m proposing on this research just isn’t something that is usually used. I see a chance for bringing a brand new approach and methodological tradition to an issue that has been central for policy for a lot of many years.”
The general health of consumers is the explanation food assistance programs exist, yet measuring long-term dietary impacts and shifts in purchase behavior is difficult. In past research, Aouad notes that the short-term effects of food assistance interventions may be significant. Nevertheless, these effects are sometimes short-lived. “That is a captivating query that I don’t think we are going to have the option to deal with inside the space of interventions that we might be considering. Nevertheless, I feel it’s something I would really like to capture within the research, and possibly develop hypotheses for future work around how we are able to shift nutrition-related behaviors in the long term.”
While his project develops a brand new methodology to calibrate food assistance programs, large-scale applications usually are not promised. “Loads of what drives subsidy mechanisms and food assistance programs can also be, quite frankly, how easy it’s and the way cost-effective it’s to implement these policies in the primary place,” comments Aouad. Cost and infrastructure barriers are unavoidable to this type of policy research, in addition to sustaining these programs. Aouad’s effort will provide insights into customer preferences and subsidy optimization in a pilot setup, but replicating this approach on an actual scale could also be costly. Aouad hopes to have the option to assemble proxy information from customers that will each feed into the model and supply insight right into a less expensive solution to collect data for large-scale implementation.
There remains to be much work to be done to make sure food security for all, whether it’s advances in agriculture, food-assistance programs, or ways to spice up adequate nutrition. Because the 2026 seed grant deadline approaches, J-WAFS will proceed its mission of supporting MIT faculty as they pursue revolutionary projects which have practical and real impacts on water and food system challenges.
