A large, diverse audience

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Yesterday, on the morning of Thursday December 15^th, an audience of more than 120 scientists gathered online to follow the 1^st Pre-Forum held by FoodSafety4EU.

Food safety enthusiasts attended from all over the world: Albania, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Scotland, Switzerland, and Tunisia. For the record, half of them were attending from work, half from home #CovidLife.

All sectors of the Food Safety System were represented:

And most of them had been working on agro/food-related topics for more than 10 years:

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Highly engaging scientific and society pitches from top-quality speakers

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The whole event was live-streamed, so you can listen to those pitches directly on this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvKtxTyYscY

1. 08:31–23:00 Dr. Stef Bronzwaer, Research Coordinator, ED Office, EFSA[v1] , presented the modern context of food sustainability and the current objectives of the One Health paradigm in today’s EU Food Safety System.
2. 24:25-40:05 Dr. Sandra Coecke, Horizontal Team Leader F2F Methods and Models for One Health, European Commission JRC, presented the next generation of food safety testing models and methods, considering the sustainability needs of European food production.
3. 42:35-46:30 Dr Maurizio Notarfonso, SPES GEIE / Federalimentare, presented the Seafood Tomorrow project, aiming at ensuring the safety of European seafood by improving testing methods and supporting innovative technologies.
4. 47:12-51:08 Dr Solveig Langsrud, Norwegian Food Research Institute Nofima, presented the SafeConsume project, a H2020 Research and Innovation Action aiming to mitigate risk of food borne infection at the consumer part of the chain, considering Education of young people, Tools and products, Improved food safety policy and Communication with consumers.
5. 53:06-56:40 Dr Giuseppe Meca, Researcher and Professor, Universitat de Valencia, presented the BiOrangePack project, aiming to increase the efficiency, sustainability and competitiveness of the post-farming processing chain of organic citrus fruit, by intervening in points of weakness and the unresolved problems of this supply chain.
6. 57:36-01:02:36 Dr Karl Presser, Premotec GmbH, presented the Expert Finder App, a new digital tool of the FoodSafety4EU platform, aiming at creating a database of scientific, society and industry experts of Food Safety, in order to facilitate exchanges of information, knowledge and networking on particular food safety related issues whenever needed.
7. 01:03:42-01:07:10 Dr Marco Ricci, Politecnico di Torino, presented a research project on microwave sensing for food contamination monitoring, especially focusing on physical hazards that can only hardly be detected in foods currently.
8. 01:07:47-01:11:30 Dr Michele Suman, Food Safety & Authenticity Research Manager, Barilla SpA, presented the Barilla Sustainable Farming strategy, beyond farm gate and value chain actions, leading to a “Handbook for the Sustainable Cultivation of Quality Durum Wheat”, a new “sustainability tool” tailored on a decision support system called granoduro.net® and the design and use of a set of rules on durum wheat cultivation contracts.

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A fruitful and enlightening interactive session

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Thanks to the cheerful animating skills of Dr Filipa Melo de Vasconcelos (ASAE) and Dr Erin Vera (ILSI Europe), the conference became a participatory session of learnings and discussion, the audience asking questions to the speakers, expressing opinions and sharing ideas via real-time polls and requests (Mentimeter).

Here are some of the important learnings that we can take home concerning this high-quality audience scientific, political, personal opinions, hopes and appreciations about the current and future European food sustainability issues and food safety system:

How much did the audience agree with those propositions?

Then, a series of targeted questions were asked to the successive speakers of the day, concerning their respective scientific projects, their views of the current EU food safety concerns, or their opinions on recent scientific and society topics. You can find them here, starting at 01:28:58.

Finally, we collected the audience’s interest ranking for several food sustainability related topics:

This insight will definitely guide us in the definition of next year’s 2^nd PreForum Conference!

This was a very successful attempt at gathering an expert audience around sustainable food safety, as well as a truly joyful event! We hope you enjoyed it, if you were there, and we expect those that couldn’t attend to stay tuned for our next conference!

In any case, please share your opinions and ideas about this conference and for the future of the EU sustainable food safety, directly on the conference stream video!

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