"Engage with the future": A brief summary of the 13th Pangborn Sensory Science Symposium

The 13th Pangborn Sensory Science Symposium, the most important conference in the sensory and consumer field, started in the afternoon of the 28th of July 2019 in Edinburgh, Scotland at the prestigious Edinburgh International Convention Centre. This edition - organized jointly by the conference chairs Professor Joanne Hort (Massey University, New Zealand), David Lyon (Firmenich, UK) Cindy Beeren (Leatherhead Food Research, UK) and by three different committees - collected more than 1168 delegates from over 50 countries around the world. Interestingly, at the event the attendees from industry (54%) were more than the one from academia (46%). The conference chairs welcomed the delegates on behalf of the organizing committee and illustrated the conference program and the 10 selected topics for this edition: cross cultural issues, digital opportunities and big data, emerging sensory and consumer science methodologies, fundamentals of perception, global resource challenges, health, lifestyle and wellbeing, next generation retail, sensometrics, sensory and consumer science through the lifespan (children, young, elderly) and another general section. These topics were extensively discussed by the participants during the 81 oral presentations - constituted by 3 keynote lectures, 8 plenary presentations and 70 other lectures held in 12 different parallel sessions - and during the two poster sessions where more than 500 posters were presented. The scientific committee made a selection of 28 posters that had the chance to be pitched by their authors through a 5-min flash presentation in two different sessions. At the event, 10 workshops and 6 learnshops were also held ranging on different topics from exploring individual eating experience to the role of social media in sensory and consumer research, passing by the role of context on product evaluation and on perfume elicited emotions. These interactive occasions, offered the possibility to actively participate at the discussion also through the usage of different apps to fill online questionnaires and to perform sensory tests on different products. The event offered many different networking opportunities between the delegates and the 37 exhibitors, as evidenced by the active discussion at the oral presentations, the poster sessions, during the coffee and lunch breaks and during the gala dinner organized in the suggestive location of the National Scotland Museum.