The new trends and challenges for sensory and consumers sciences: Outcomes from EUROSENSE 2018, a sense of taste

The 8th European Conference on Sensory and Consumer Research (EUROSENSE) took place in Italy, 2–5 September 2018 in the “fair Verona”, birthplace of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet novel. The conference was organized by Professor Erminio Montelone (University of Firenze, Italy. Conference Chair) together with an organizing committee - composed of 9 member of the Italian Sensory Science Society (SISS) - and the international scientific committee in association with Elsevier, the European Sensory Science Society (E3S) and the SISS. There were a total of 727 delegates from 26 countries all around the world even if the majority was from the European Union (73%). The conference chair welcomed the delegates on behalf of the organizing committee and illustrated how the conference was organized and the list of selected topics for this edition. In particular scientific topics were divided in two categories: the category sensory for comprehensive of topics related to health, innovation, sustainability, eating out, and individual differences and the category other fields of sensory which included genetics, mind science, text analysis, statistics, advanced instrumental analysis and new technologies. This edition was also the occasion to present the first results from the Italian Taste project, a 3 year project born in 2015. The collaboration of more than 21 research unities across Italy collected data from 3185 subjects with the final aim of studying the link between sensitivity, liking and eating habits of Italians. EUROSENSE 2018 was the opportunity to have a complete overview on all the different research outcomes and current trends in the sensory and consumer science field. Lectures and posters covered many different themes of both fundamental and applied research. There were a total of 75 oral presentations constituted by 9 keynote lectures and 66 other lectures held in five parallel sessions divided in 9 major themes: sensory for health, understanding consumers, eating out and context studies, individual differences, emotions in sensory and consumer studies, sensory for sustainability, instrumental measuring for sensory, mind science for sensory and advancement in sensory methods. It should also be mentioned that different workshops on sensory topics where held at the conference. Three different tutorials on temporal sensory methods, Bayesian methods for sensory and consumer data and sensometrics were held just before the beginning of the conference while four other workshops were run during the parallel sessions. Poster presentation numbered 386 (24 had the opportunity to be presented through flash presentations during plenary) and a total of 590 abstracts were submitted to the scientific committee. The posters covered a wide range of topics and complemented the oral presentations. They were presented in two really afternoon poster presentation sessions.