On 19 April 2023, the FEM SUA in Nitra welcomed the participants of the international workshop “Sharing best practices among food consumer science experts”, organised within the Horizon 2020 project COMFOCUS.
The aim of the event was to hear the opinion about the project approach and get input to whether this approach makes sense or if things should be done differently, as well as to learn whether the harmonised protocols and measures would be helpful in participants’ research. The round table discussion offered both offline and online participation.
On the meeting, the project approach was shortly introduced by the project coordinator Machiel Reinders (Wageningen University, the Netherlands), followed by discussions in smaller groups to brainstorm ideas, supervised by Liisa Lähteenmäki (Aarhus University, Denmark).
At the end of the event, the 2nd Open Call of the project was officially launched by local project coordinator and WP3 leader, prof. Elena Horská. Its aim is to provide an opportunity for early career researchers to gain access to European consumer science institutes specializing in psychophysiological measurements, virtual and augmented reality research, and conduct collaborative research on important food consumer science questions. 67 positions are offered to conduct research in one of the participating institutions, designed to accommodate research projects that align with the expertise and research priorities of the various institutes.
The EU-funded COMFOCUS project aims to advance food consumer science by taking a critical view to the concepts and methods used, in order to produce harmonised measures and protocols. Having these harmonised approaches will enable to compare findings from different studies and make it possible to integrate data from several studies. The final goal is to create the COMFOCUS starting community for food consumer science.