Edulia innovated by developing, testing and understanding key principles of interventions targeting a positive and enabling food environment for children, with a child-focused approach. This could only be achieved when (1) there is direct input from children in product development to reflect their taste and perspective, (2) there is insight into individual differences in responding to healthy foods to better target interventions, (3) healthy eating is self-motivating, 'normal' and effortless (nudging).
We aimed to understanding direct input from children into product development to formulate healthy products that children would actively choose and eat. Edulia will explore children’s individuality on sensory sensitivity, liking, and how exposure influences overeating, for recommending regulation strategies. We will propose how to design physical and social surroundings to nudge children into healthy eating, contributing to habit formation. Edulia will go further than “teaching children what is healthy”, through positive marketing, nudging strategies, focusing on peer and family social interactions in real settings, studying sensory and non-sensory parameters underlying overeating and exploiting the positive sensory characters of healthy food. Particularly innovative aspects in Edulia are: children-driven NPD, adapted data collection methods and cutting-edge approaches as the use of nudging, text mining big data, social media marketing or design-driven co-creation.
Our research will fill gaps between academic research and practitioner knowledge and creating a specialised workforce directed to tackle the problem of children’s unhealthy eating from a multidisciplinary perspective, contributing to a sustainable benefit to the EU.
ESRs in the network experienced cross-sector opportunities, opening new career perspectives and becoming more successful in networking due to their cross-border training and the exposure to researchers from the EU and beyond.
Edulia linked to Eurodoc and other PhD associations strengthening communication with other early stage researchers.
Edulia aimed to strengthen innovation capacity in EU, bringing ideas from lab to market and generating innovative social tools that allow recommendations for health policies.
Beneficiaries have recruited first-class ESRs, adding to their competences. Edulia has strengthened the links among them, generating lasting collaborations. Our healthy product development projects will hopefully impact the food industry. Further impact will be attained through communication to the public, links to other EU projects, to the industry and to Policy Makers.
All our ESRs were women, and we have promoted the role of women in science through our communication.
More than 30 scientific papers are published by the project, with 20 more in the pipeline. We will continue updating our website, with links to publications, executive summaries and reports .
