News Archives | FNHRI

The 2nd meeting of the FNH-RI Consortium took place on 5 March 2026 via Teams

FNH-RI — Wed, 06 May 2026 11:03:36 +0000

The 2nd meeting of the FNH-RI Consortium took place on 5 March 2026 via Teams. The consortium, led by Prof. Ing. Adriana Kolesárová, PhD., Director of the AgroBioTech Research Centre, continues to create space for coordinated cooperation in the fields of food, nutrition and health, and for strengthening Slovakia’s connection to the European research infrastructure community.

During the meeting, partners focused on current opportunities, coordination tasks and next steps for the development of the consortium platform.

The main topics discussed included:

current Horizon Europe Cluster 6 calls relevant to the consortium
potential areas for joint project preparation, including sustainable and healthy diets, microbiome research, AI-based tools and food-related decision-making
update and redesign of the FNH-RI website
revision of national notes and partner information
update of consortium agreements and national-level cooperation arrangements
planning of the next consortium meeting and follow-up activities

The meeting also highlighted the importance of keeping national platform information up to date. Partners will be asked to review their national notes, update contact details, identify national contact persons and suggest improvements to the common template. A unified structure and visual style for national platform pages was recommended.
SPU in Nitra also informed partners that a redesign of the FNH-RI website is currently being prepared on the Slovak side. The updated website should better reflect the current composition of the consortium, partner expertise and future cooperation opportunities.

The consortium agreed to continue regular monthly meetings. The next meeting was proposed for April 2026, with SPU planning to present the first steps related to the website redesign and further updates connected to the development of the consortium platform.

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The first FNH-RI Consortium meeting of 2026 is behind us!

FNH-RI — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 07:59:33 +0000

The FNH-RI Consortium, led by Prof. Ing. Adriana Kolesárová, PhD., Director of the AgroBioTech Research Centre, opens space for coordinated cooperation in the fields of food, nutrition, and health, and for connecting Slovakia to the European community of research infrastructures.

The consortium brings together partners from many European countries – the Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Spain, France, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Portugal, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia. It is an international consortium with great potential, offering numerous opportunities for collaboration, exchange of expertise, and joint project submissions (especially within Horizon Europe and other European initiatives).

During the meeting, we focused on:
updates on consortium countries and partners
the ESFRI Roadmap 2026 and next steps at the European level
new Horizon Europe calls and opportunities for joint projects
support for building a national ESFRI-type platform in Slovakia (VIESF) and the development of the national FNH-RI node (DATA–FACT–TED)

More information: fnhri.eu
Consortium contact: FNH-RI@uniag.sk

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COMFOCUS newsletter

FNH-RI — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 12:20:39 +0000

COMFOCUS project, funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme aims to progress the EU food consumer science community by integrate key European research infrastructures in the inherently multidisciplinary field of food consumer science, in order to promote their optimal use and joint development.

Go to the COMFOCUS website to sign up for their newsletter or go directly to COMFOCUS Newsletter #2 to read the latest newsletter.

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FNH-RI and COVID-19

FNH-RI — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 08:59:32 +0000

The COVID-19 pandemic dominates our lives and work. That is also the case for the work on the Food, Nutrition and Health Research Infrastructure. One of the interesting discussions in the project team in the hub that works with the support of the nodes on the final version of the ESFRI proposal, concerns the question if COVID-19 increases the need for the FNH-RI.

I think it does. The first thing that strikes me about the COVID-19 pandemic is that it is a health crisis which has close links to the food system and which exposes the inherent weaknesses in it. It is a zoonosis which seems to have emerged as a result of the unprofessional and perhaps even illegal trade in exotic wild animals in Wuhan. But it is still a zoonosis, and although as far as the experts are concerned it has little to do with the way we keep cattle, that is not how many members of the public see it: in the Netherlands there is a widespread belief that it is essentially no different from Q fever and that ‘Mother Nature is striking back’. Recent COVID-19 cases in mink production and problems with containment in slaughterhouses strengthen fears. Rightly or wrongly, in management and politics, ‘feelings are facts’.

A second striking phenomenon is that many coronavirus patients in intensive care units are men with obesity and lifestyle-related disorders. Nutrition and lifestyle clearly play a role. Up to now, governments have been reluctant to get involved in helping people attain a healthy lifestyle, but the realisation is now growing that preventive health care needs to be given more prominence alongside or within the study of medicine. A third issue is air quality. Not only are people currently experiencing what it is like to live in a cleaner environment which seems to be saving large numbers of lives, but there are also indications that air pollution impacts on the number of victims, whether through transmission or because of poorer health conditions of people.

The fact that these phenomena impact on the consumer/general public and our living environment ties in seamlessly with a scientific analysis of the food system and the need for a transition to a more sustainable and healthy system that has been ongoing for some years: the negative effects are at the beginning and end of the supply chain – the weakest links – and policymakers are reluctant to intervene.

My expectation and hope is that we will learn from the pandemic and organise the post-COVID-19 society in such a way that the food and health systems make our society a better place. That asks for government interventions to promote a sustainable and healthy way of living. In science it asks for linking the topics of food and health, first of all in our data management.

The pandemic also speeds up the digital society: several countries have introduced a corona apps, and citizens moved to substitute digital payments for cash. Online sales blossom. The demand for healthy food increases. This shows that citizens can change their behaviour more strongly than some governments tend to think – and that data on this behaviour is available in a digital format somewhere. We just have to combine it.

The pandemic is one big social experiment in which governments and citizens take decisions that were unthinkable in the past. The FNH-RI is more needed than ever to underpin decision making in this area of sustainable and healthy food.

Krijn Poppe / Wageningen Economic Research

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One infrastructure boosts European food and health research

FNH-RI — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 10:37:15 +0000

Food and health are inextricably related to each other. We all know that we need a healthy and varied diet. We also know that too much fat, sugar or salt is bad for our health. It is up to science to devise solutions for problems related to food and health: which factors, such as habits, lifestyle, preferences and taste, play a role in consumer food choice behaviour? How, for example, can ‘personalised nutrition‘ help the consumer avoid developing specific health complaints? How can we ensure that a healthy choice becomes the consumer’s habitual choice? And how should we anticipate climate change and economic fluctuations to provide assurances for food security? A research infrastructure for food, nutrition and health will help answer this question.

As food and health issues are major issues, research in the Food & Health area is placed high on the national research agenda of most European Member States. However, the problem is that the various European agendas are not appropriately harmonised. Moreover, the research indicators are not identical and different tools and methods are used to collect, analyse and process data. An analogy to this would be a European rail network in which the differences in the track gauge, rolling stock and railway timetable in each country compel international passengers to change trains at the national borders – possibly to discover that the last train has just left.

Closing the knowledge gap

For this reason, a large number of research institutes are working – under the direction of Wageningen University & Research – on a joint European infrastructure for scientific research into food, health and consumer behaviour. One European research infrastructure will ensure that we will soon all adopt one set of indicators that are used with the same type of data that is inputted in the same manner. This will then enable the stakeholders to compare, link and share research data. One infrastructure will also improve our ability to identify themes for which more knowledge is required and then determine how the knowledge gap can be closed. This is in everyone’s interest – from consumers and companies in the food industry to policy-makers and nutritional experts.

Consumer as the linking pin

In my opinion, the emergence of a European research infrastructure marks a crucial step towards scientific breakthroughs that will lay the foundations for successful behavioural interventions and innovative food products. This infrastructure will need consumer data on purchasing behaviour, lifestyle, the preparation and consumption of food and the effect of food on the human body. We intend to collect this data by offering consumers, in their role as linking pin, a platform for the voluntary sharing of individual data on behaviour, food intake and health. Consumers who supply this data will receive individual feedback that will be dependent on the situation, the time of consumption and the location. This will take place within the scope of the EU-project RICHFIELDS (
www.richfields.eu).

Scientific research into diseases such as obesity carried out in the USA was standardised many decades ago. However, in the absence of this standardisation in Europe a tremendous gap yawns in the knowledge domain. One European research infrastructure will provide cross-border consumer insights and will enable us to give much more careful consideration to the place food and health is assigned on the European and national research agendas. So let’s close the yawning gap!

Karin Zimmermann

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European platform for nutrition and health a crucial tool for retail and food industry

FNH-RI — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 10:34:00 +0000

Most people living in Europe consume too much salt, fat and sugar. This is leading to an increase in the number of people suffering from diet-related illnesses, such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. To curb this trend, European consumers must be encouraged to eat more healthily – and it must be made easy for them to make this choice. Companies that are active in the food industry play a key role here, as the onus is on them to develop products that
are both tasty and healthy.

Insight into consumer behaviour is essential for development healthy products

Knowledge is at the heart of each successful healthy food product. This knowledge includes information on consumers’ food intake and how this affects their bodies, as well as information on consumer behaviour (what goes on their shopping lists and, ultimately, what and how they consume). We still have a long way to go in this area. With a spectrum of different measuring methods, techniques and indicators, there is still no uniform European standard for precompetitive research into nutrition, consumer behaviour and health. This fragmentation has led to a worrying lack of data in the European research domain of ‘Consumer, Nutrition and Health’ that can be linked up and compared. Thankfully, the feed and food industry has been investing heavily in R&D. That said, besides the immense amount of capital this requires, the fragmented data are out of date after just two years and cannot be compared between countries. The majority of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) also cannot afford to carry out costly research, resulting in a knowledge gap caused by the lack of knowledge feedback.

Standardisation needed to compare consumer behaviour

In light of this, Wageningen University & Research has joined forces with research institutes from eight European countries to build a European infrastructure for scientific research into nutrition, health and consumer behaviour. By standardising and harmonising indicators so that they can be compared between countries, we are able to create comparable and linkable data sets and tools. This approach is unique in the way it focuses on consumers. The EU-project RICHFIELDS (www.richfields.eu) aims to establish a European platform for consumers to share personal information on their eating patterns, food intake and health with other players in the chain. The next challenge for companies is to analyse these big data in a meaningful way. While large companies have the expertise to do this, smaller companies do not. To give them a helping hand in becoming a driving force within nutrition and health, they are being trained to organise and open up data effectively.

With joint infrastructure, retail and food industry can develop and market attractive and healthy products

Having a united European research infrastructure is an enormous boost for the business community. This is particularly true for retail businesses, which have been gathering data on purchasing behaviour for decades now. However, while research and industry still have very limited access to these large data sets, retail businesses are also not gaining the greatest benefit from research into how consumer behaviour, nutrition and health fit together. A common infrastructure could also be extremely useful for food and feed companies. By sharing and opening up essential precompetitive knowledge, they will be in a better position to plug the gap and develop consumer products that are both tasty and healthy. All in all, this has brought us a step closer to establishing an approach that successfully reduces diet-related diseases in Europe.

Karin Zimmermann

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Closer collaboration between scientific disciplines leads to health benefits

FNH-RI — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 10:30:54 +0000

The key to a long and healthy life is a balanced and healthy diet. Thanks to biomedical research – scientific research in the field of medicine – we are now well aware what a healthy diet needs to include as part of a healthy lifestyle. If every consumer followed the guidance of the Netherlands Nutrition Centre (Voedingscentrum), our society as a whole would reap the considerable health benefits. But unfortunately, that is not the case.

Poor cooperation between scientific disciplines

Why is this? One of the main reasons is that various scientific disciplines are not collaborating enough. Behaviour experts know everything about what motivates consumer behaviour: what social context people eat in and what in their environment persuades them to buy certain products. Having precisely the right knowledge is crucial, if you want healthy choices made by consumers to become the norm. In turn, behavioural interventions also lead to undesired social effects. It has been decades since nutrition experts first highlighted the dangers of saturated and trans fats in food. In the public awareness campaigns that followed, all fats were made taboo, for reasons of simplicity. But, as a result, carbohydrates and sugars became more widespread, meaning we are now saddled with an enormous obesity problem.

Consumers profit from researchers who collaborate

If we want to build a society where people live more healthily, live longer and rely less on care, then we as scientists need to get better at working together. That’s why we are working with Wageningen University & Research, together with other research institutes, on a common research infrastructure. Something that everyone can benefit from. Not least consumers, who provide information about their nutritional choices for research purposes and get tailored health advice in return.

Responding to consumer needs

The food industry gains from this, too. As ever, many products are now simply enriched with nutrients to comply with standards on healthy eating. However, healthy food is not just a bunch of nutrients. Rather, it’s a complex mix of physiological factors: for millions of years, our physiological system has been activated by smelling, tasting and chewing, and through various components interacting with each other in the body in different ways. If we can make this easier for the food industry, they can help make sure their products tie in better with consumers’ biological and sensory needs. And it means other consumer trends, such as the demand for local, sustainable, Fairtrade and animal-friendly food, could be tapped into much more effectively.
Closer collaboration between scientific disciplines leads to health benefits

Research infrastructure required for a healthy and sustainable society

Policymakers benefit too, of course. With a higher quantity and quality of data available, they are able to take
action more effectively in areas such as pricing policy, modifying nutrition guidelines and providing information,
when required. What’s more, they learn more about what interventions are useful, which ones are best ignored
and which ones reinforce each other. A harmonised European research infrastructure is required for a future-proof
European food system, and is a major step forward on the path to a healthy and sustainable society.

Pieter van ‘t Veer

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Building with bits and bytes in search of the core offering of a digital research infrastructure

FNH-RI — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 16:02:53 +0000

The term ‘research infrastructure’ readily conjures up the image of large-scale research facilities that can be used by different studies. In other words: physical infrastructure for classical research. But we are now living in a digital era. Increasingly more research is being carried out with digital data. The emergence of big data, open data, and ever further-reaching progress in artificial intelligence facilitate the development of knowledge and insight without random samples and experiments. In a society that is becoming increasingly digitised, the growth in the number of digital data sets is explosive. Research is thus becoming more and more data-driven. However, the data sets originate from different sources and have diverse structures, variables and measurements. Innovation at both a technical and organisational level is needed in order to use these data sets effectively and efficiently. Challenges in this regard include: How do you find the right data? How do you ensure that the data are interpreted correctly? How do you guarantee the integrity of the data? And what arrangements need to be made regarding data access and use?

The answer to these questions lies in the development of a digital ‘road network’, or a digital research infrastructure, an important theme in EU research programmes. Besides researchers, such digital research infrastructures can also assist other stakeholders with their data-driven research, for example in the development of citizen science in which consumers and the public are becoming increasingly more engaged.

Core offering of a digital research infrastructure

But how do you develop a digital research infrastructure? Where do you begin? Who must you involve? And what added value must this research infrastructure provide? How do you make such a valuable research infrastructure sustainable and robust? In order to answer these questions, you first have to determine the core offering of the research infrastructure.

An example of a digital research infrastructure is the ‘Research Infrastructure for Food, Health, and Nutrition’ programme with its various associated research projects. The EU H2020-project (www.richfields.eu) is one of these. I have been working as a researcher on RICHFIELDS since 2015. It is an ambitious project because we want to lay the foundation for a joint European infrastructure for research into nutrition, health and behaviour.

The research infrastructure we are working on is primarily for researchers, making it far easier for us to share, link and use scientific data and insights. But we cannot find solutions for social challenges that are related to nutrition and health without the involvement of the other links in the chain. These include consumers and businesses that supply us with data on purchasing behaviour, preparation, consumption and lifestyle. They also include policymakers who base policy decisions relating to nutrition, health and behaviour on validated research data.

It is tempting to devise all types of functionalities for such an infrastructure in order to be able to serve as many stakeholders as possible. But a research project has a limited lifetime and resources. This means that not everything is possible within the available time and resources. A choice from the core value is then unavoidable. In other words: what is your core offering? What do you want to have achieved in four years, the lifetime of the project? And what can be developed further afterwards? Will it become a data hub? Or is it mainly a portal with links to different data sources? Are you building new standards or mainly harmonising existing ones?

Defining building blocks together

The research infrastructure should ideally provide added value to all links in the data chain. However, searching for the core offering of RICHFIELDS has been a long process, precisely because we want to provide added value to all links in the chain.
The research infrastructure design has come about through close consultation with consumer, business and government representatives. An important outcome of this has been the definition of building blocks. Building blocks of the digital research infrastructure include data models in order to make variables from different databases comparable. For example, if we want to research how breakfast contributes towards the health of European consumers, we must first properly define what we mean by ‘breakfast’. After all, breakfast habits vary greatly in Europe and data from different studies cannot simply be bundled together.

Building blocks such as data models are the technical elements of the digital research infrastructure. A digital infrastructure also needs organisational building blocks. This will be the topic of a subsequent blog by my colleague, Marc-Jeroen Bogaardt.

Search for the core offering of RICHFIELDS

Do you already have ideas for the application of the infrastructure? Leave your ideas or questions below. You can, of course, always contact us directly!

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A common platform for policy research as a solution to the obesity crisis in Europe

FNH-RI — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 15:55:37 +0000

Europe is struggling with an obesity crisis. We have created a society in which consumers are surrounded on nearly all sides by sweet, salty, fatty and over-portioned temptations. While the opinion that consumers themselves should take responsibility for their own diet is valid to some extent, governments have been introducing policies that are fundamentally food-related, with regulations on fruit at school, changes to VAT rates and licences to establish a business. However, there is still more we can do to encourage consumers to eat healthily and sustainably, given the failure of the market to address these issues. To begin with, there has been a significant increase in the social costs of diet-related diseases. These are costs that we all bear. WHO estimates indicate that the costs of obesity are 2 to 7% of the total health costs worldwide. A second argument in favour of a consumer-oriented food policy is that a healthy diet and a sustainable diet are intrinsically linked. A reduction in meat consumption and an increase in the consumption of fruit and vegetables would relieve the pressure on our world’s natural resources. This transition plays a key role in our efforts to mitigate the consequences of climate change.

The Netherlands: good infrastructure for policy research

If we are to successfully combat these negative effects, we require effective policy. But what counts as ‘effective policy’? The answer is policy research with sound scientific backing. In concrete terms, this means research that gathers reliable data on nutrition, consumer behaviour and health before, during and after interventions in order to assess the effectiveness of a policy instrument. The Netherlands has a good infrastructure for policy research, with numerous planning offices and assessment agencies as well as universities that are leaders in research into nutrition and health.
These include Wageningen University & Research and the ‘Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezondheid en Milieu’ (Dutch national institute for public health and the environment, RIVM), which have a long history of policy research and good data sets in some subareas. And partly thanks to the current interest in nutrition and health, consumers are much more open to new technologies such as smartphone apps, like FoodProfiler (www.wur.nl/foodprofiler).

… but food policy has a European dimension

At the same time, many aspects of food policy have a European dimension. We know that policies are most effective when they are made in consultation with the international business community. After all, companies such as Carrefour, Sodexo, Unilever or Nestlé tailor their adverts, packaging and recipes to at least one regional market and, in many cases, to the European market as a whole. Second, we are better able to implement measures when we work together. Take the Danish ‘fat tax’, a measure that fell flat due to its complexity and the way in which it led many Danish consumers to do their shopping over the border in Germany or Sweden. Owners of Dutch petrol stations along the border are all too familiar with this behaviour. A third argument in favour of international research collaboration is the fact that countries can learn from each other. For instance, if France’s decision to offer healthy school meals leads to an improvement in schoolchildren’s health and grades, policymakers in the Netherlands may consider implementing this measure in neighbourhoods in which we know that many children start the school day on an empty stomach. And finally, there is an argument that appeals to the Dutch preoccupation with thrift: joining forces means less expense, as the costs are shared.

One European research infrastructure

In light of this, Wageningen University & Research has teamed up with fellow knowledge institutes from eight European countries to build one European infrastructure for scientific research into consumer, nutrition and health. A variety of instruments have been set up for this purpose, including the European research project RICHFIELDS (www.richfields.eu). We expect the groundwork for this common research infrastructure to be completed by 2023. Having one European infrastructure means we can soon look forward to a situation in which we all use the same indicators, are in a much better position to utilise each other’s knowledge and are able to significantly reduce the costs of research. This will enable us to establish a solid basis for effective European food policy.

Krijn Poppe

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