On February 10th 2024, COMFOCUS had its second face-to-face Academic Training in Bologna, Italy. It was hosted by the University of Bologna, Department of Agri-food Sciences and Technologies.
The training started with the welcoming word from Prof. Dr. Matteo Vittuari (University of Bologna), who was happy to greet the COMFOCUS fellows, PhD and MSc students (University of Bologna), consortium members and a member of International Advisory Board (IAB) in the walls of the University of Bologna.
Professor Hans van Trijp (Wageningen University&Research) started the training with his presentation on the future of COMFOCUS: project ambition and vision. In his presentation, he talked about the food consumer science field that faces challenges in the modern world, strong worldwide need to change diets to prevent diseases, climate change and environmental harm.
A major transition is required in such turbulent times for all actors in the entire food system, including understanding consumers and changing their behaviour.
IAB member of COMFOCUS Sylvain Delplanque (Swiss Center for Affective Sciences) then continued the event with his investigation of the properties of fragrances in humans and how smells influence consumers choices.
Philip Dean from the University of Surrey presented the EEG approaches, in particular, he gave an interesting lecture on the opportunities of EEG, including the COMFOCUS context.
Participants previously prepared scientific posters based on their research and had the opportunity to present them to other fellows and participants, which was very interactive and highlighted the need for knowledge sharing.
Austeja Kazemekaityte (University of Trento) gave a speech on measuring psychophysiological signals in a harmonised way and the need for harmonisation.
Prof. Dr. Matteo Masotti (University of Bologna) lectured on choice experiments in virtual settings and concluded with the importance of specific research, sampling and data collection strategies and having considerations of the impact of specific biases and the novelty effect.
All participants had an incredible possibility to verify their uncertainties in the insightful Q&A session on the specifics of food consumer science.
In the end, participants of the event had a session on sustainability of COMFOCUS and were proposed to look at the main Key Exploitable Results (KERs) and the main actions to be taken to maintain the project developments and activities after its end.
It was a very productive and dynamic training with lots of insights and interesting dialogs that will surely help us to foster the COMFOCUS approach and to advance the food consumer science field.