Request for EIT Food RIS Consumer Engagement Labs Implementing Participants (Only for RIS Countries)

EIT Food recruits participants to join an existing consortium tasked with implementing EIT Food RIS Consumer Engagement Labs. Applications are sought from local consortia, consisting of two participants: a scientific organisation and a food company, jointly applying to implement the local co-creation process of Consumer Engagement Labs in their country and assume the respective roles in orchestrating the local co-creation workshops (scientific organisations) and development of new products based on ideas co-created with consumers (food companies).

EIT Food RIS Consumer Engagement Labs aim to support up to six consortia in 2025, delivering 1 co-creation process per consortium. Co-creation sessions with consumers will be implemented in the targeted countries, based on Consumer Engagement Labs methodology developed by University of Warsaw.

Each creative process will be orchestrated by a local scientific organisation with the participation of a local food company, aiming to address a specific, identified societal challenge that could be addressed by the development of new food products.

Each challenge will be defined by local activity partners in their application to join the project. Local food companies participate in selected steps of consumer co-creation sessions organised by the local scientific partner responsible for each Labs process. Afterwards, they carry out proposal screening looking for commercially feasible product concepts, analysing and expanding proposals put forward by consumers.

The selected, commercially feasible products will undergo further in-house R&D/product development efforts to reach higher technology readiness levels and be tested on the market. Each company-participant will be expected to introduce one new product on the market and leverage consumer insights from co-creation processes to improve/enhance one existing product or its packaging.

Participants are recruited in this call to join the project and implement consumer co-creation processes in Q1-2’2025 that will result in design and development of new food products that will be introduced to the market in 2025–2026.

Applications are submitted electronically via EIT Food platform by one applicant, entering details for both members of the local consortium (scientific organisation and food company). Only the contents of application form fields will be evaluated. Please make sure to provide all data that you want to be evaluated as answers in respective fields of the application forms. Please do not share additional supporting documents or other files because they will not be evaluated.

The deadline for the submission of full applications is 4th of February, 2025, at 11:00 AM CET.

Apply through this link.

All applications must be posted in English to the deadline mentioned above.