The Final COMFOCUS Conference has taken place 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 other researchers in the food consumer science field. The Final COMFOCUS Academic Training was also held within the event and gathered thirty research fellows. Participants represented different European countries, including Poland, Chechia, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Netherlands, Germany, Kosovo, Norway.

 

The Final COMFOCUS Conference hosted the COMFOCUS market session, where participants had the opportunity to explore and share experiences with emerging technologies in the field of FCS. Five dedicated sessions were held within the COMFOCUS market, focusing on both emerging technologies and the Toolbox. Specifically, participants were introduced to Virtual Reality, Eye Tracking, and EEG devices, with live demonstrations by Noldus Hub.

 

Another session about experiences and insights from the new way of working aimed to share feedback and insights on what we call in COMFOCUS the “new way of working”, as well as innovative approaches in food consumer science, gathered from the community. These insights, derived from the project's community, are believed to contribute to advancing this field.

For more information about the Final COMFOCUS Conference follow the link.

 

Goal of COMFOCUS is to advance the Food Consumer Science (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:

 

Sustaining the COMFOCUS results

As COMFOCUS aims to leave a long-lasting impact on FCS, sustaining the project achievements was one of the most important tasks for the whole consortium throughout these years.

This impact we are aiming to achieve through the main Key Exploitable Results (KERs) of the project, namely:

•  Institutional community of New Way of Working
• The COMFOCUS Toolbox
• Harmonised measures, guidelines and protocols

Through “Institutional community of New Way of Working”, we aim to continue collaborative way of conducting research, engaging between institutions. This approach allows share information and receive more valuable outputs for research;

 

Our achievements:

The COMFOCUS Toolbox – with a set of tools facilitates access and use, and moving the community towards higher levels of collaboration between key research infrastructures.

 

The COMFOCUS Toolbox has played a crucial role in supporting the work of fellows participating in Open Calls, particularly in structuring their research methodologies and ensuring data quality. The Harmonized Protocol Search Tool was widely used by the OC2 fellows to develop the questionnaire components of their studies, facilitating standardized data collection. Additionally, data validation on their collected data was conducted, ensuring that datasets were correctly formatted for integration. These datasets are also stored within the Easy Questionnaire Tool, providing a structured and accessible environment for researchers.

Would you like to try out the COMFOCUS Toolbox?

Harmonised measures, guidelines and protocols – Serves as a harmonised integrated data infrastructure in the form of a “library of metadata” for protocols, measures, research procedures and guidelines informing future food consumer science studies.

 

This library ensures that all future food consumer science data follow the FAIR principles, namely that these are Findable and Accessible to all European researchers, both from academia and industry, Interoperable within the food consumer science domain and with other adjacent research infrastructures, and Re-usable as they can be aggregated and re-analyzed across time (for longitudinal trend analysis) and across culture (for cross-cultural analysis) and ultimately across scale levels to allow higher level learning (advanced data analytics).

Each user has access to the COMFOCUS library that contains harmonized measures related to:

• psycho-physiological measures;
• social consumer characteristics;
• product/food experiences and expectations;
• consumer behaviour as an outcome;
• consumer as agents in the food system;
• socio-demographics.

Check out our booklet with harmonized measurements and protocols!

 

 

Watch the project podcasts!