Final Consortium Meeting and General Assembly

The final Edulia consortium meeting, was held in beautiful Florence, Italy, June 20th. It was a pleasure to finally meet physically again after a long period with only digital meetings.

Presentations

The consortium meetings have been an arena for ESRs to present their plans and results. This time, we got status updates from only three of them, since most of them have already completed their PhDs, moreover, all of them were to present their work in the Edulia conference to be held after the meeting.

Carina Mueller (ESR5) presented status on her project “The role of sweetness exposure in taste preferences and eating behaviour in children​”. She started as an ESR autumn 2020, and will complete her PhD at WUR after  the Edulia project is finished. She presented progress of her project, with a specific focus on an upcoming data collection on a repeated exposure study in children 4-7 years old. 

Roselinde Van Nee (ESR4) needs a longer time for the PhD as the Netherlands require that PhD’s are four years. Roselinde’s objectives are to develop nudging interventions to lead children to healthier habits, and to examine impact of nudges on feelings of autonomy, and finally to  understand effects of nudging over time.

Julia Sick (ESR3) has worked on developing an emoji based questionnaire in her project on understanding the role of emotions, personality traits and sensory sensitivity in preadolescents’ food preferences. She finished her PhD this spring, but is continuing the project during a scholarship at UNIFI, as the Italian team finally has been allowed to visit schools for the data collection. In this study the aim is to investigate individual differences in emotional responses to food, sensory sensitivity and personality traits. As well as validating the previously emoji-based questionnaire.

Paula Varela (project leader) , Gaston Ares (leader WP4) and Sara Spinelli presented ongoing and planned work for colloborative papers overarching results from the project, bringing together results from multiple ESR projects.

Workshop

In order to summarize the most important research results from the project, take-home messages for different target audience (industry, policy makers/health authorities, general public, schools) from the different publications were discussed in groups. Selected take home messages were use to create infographics that will be published on this site.