Building upon two Federation of European Nutrition Societies (FENS) workshops on food-based dietary guidelines (Tetens et al., BJN 2020, Schäfer et al. BJN 2021), the German Nutrition Society conceptualized an optimization algorithm to derive their 2024 food-based dietary guidelines. The first methodological study focusing on the choice of food groups, the selection of an appropriate mathematical function and the comparison of different food groups is out now in PLOS One: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0313347