The Final COMFOCUS Conference was held in Wageningen, the Netherlands, on February 13th, 2025!
The event marked participation of eighty-two people, including consortium members, stakeholders and IAB members, project fellows and interested researchers in the food consumer science (FCS) field. The Final COMFOCUS Conference also marked the end of the Academic Trainings for the research fellows of Open Call 2 and thirty fellows participated. Participants represented different European countries, including Poland, Chechia, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Netherlands, Germany, Kosovo, Norway.
This event titled “Advancing Open Science in the Food Consumer Science Field”, aimed to share the final results of the project with the audience and conclude it with a series of engaging and insightful sessions, as well as demonstrations of emerging technologies.
The event started with a welcome address from the project management team, promoting COMFOCUS as a pioneering research community in the field of FCS.
We presented the project’s achievements to the audience and reviewed its journey over the four years since its inception. We talked about the key challenge of COMFOCUS and the FCS field itself – to be(come) a user relevant data-rich science to support the transition towards healthy and sustainable food consumption.
In discussing the project’s intentions, we highlighted our goal to advance the FCS field beyond its current fragmentation and our aim to make the “new way of working” developed within COMFOCUS a model for the field, incorporating three levels of integration:
- Institutional Collaboration – Promoting access to facilities and facilitating staff exchanges to optimize resource utilization and advance the field.
- Social Integration – Building a network of FCS researchers that is more inclusive, offering equal opportunities to early-career researchers, regardless of their location.
- Data Infrastructure – Adopting FAIR data and RRI principles to ensure that data are harmonized for interoperability and reusability.
Our dream in COMFOCUS is to make the FCS field more collaborative and open for the scientific process. Open access to data would allow researchers to verify results, replicate studies, and build upon previous findings, which could enhance the credibility and reliability of food consumer research. In addition, one of the key conference´s take aways was that the implementation process of a ‘new way of working’ can sometimes be a challenge and it takes times.
In the COMFOCUS market session, participants had the opportunity to explore and share experiences with emerging technologies in FCS. Five dedicated demonstrations were given within this session, focusing on both emerging technologies and the COMFOCUS Toolbox. Specifically, participants were introduced to Virtual Reality, Eye Tracking, and EEG devices, and live demonstrations of the Noldus Hub.
For each demonstration there were three rounds, allowing participants to choose the emerging technology device they preferred to explore along with the principles behind the specific feature.
Another session about experiences and insights from the project aimed to share feedback and insights on what we call in COMFOCUS “a new way of working”, as well as innovative approaches in FCS, gathered from the community. These insights, derived from the results of a survey conducted among the members of the project’s community, are believed to contribute to advancing this field.
During the training, the Handbook of Scales was introduced. This handbook was developed based on the harmonized measures collected and assessed during the COMFOCUS project. The Handbook of Scales is particularly valuable because it:
- Provides a collection of self-report scales commonly used in food consumer science.
- Includes 34 constructs, with recommended measures carefully selected for their relevance.
- Aims to make these measures accessible to the broader food consumer science community.
The purpose of this handbook, along with the self-report measures, is to provide background information on commonly used constructs in FCS. It aims to assist in study planning by offering inspiration for selecting relevant constructs frequently used in this field, as well as supporting the interoperability and reusability of data. The handbook also guides the selection of the best measures for these constructs by providing background on how they have been operationalized and the sources of the measures.
To conclude both the Final Conference and the project, we organized a panel discussion to gather reflections on the “new way of working” from various perspectives by five panelists involved in different parts of the project. This provided an excellent opportunity for participants to share their insights on COMFOCUS’s achievements and the value it brings to the field of FCS.
We believe COMFOCUS will prolong its existence through the continued collaboration of its research community over these unforgettable years, advancing FCS beyond its current level of fragmentation.
