Co-creation approach in development of the Food Safety Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda by FoodSafety4EU project

A Food Safety Operation Laboratory (FSOLab) was designed to have a co-creation approach dedicated to the development of a Strategic Research & Innovation Agenda (SRIA) on food safety.FSOLab consisted in a series of 3 workshops.In the first 2 workshops, Food Safety challenges as main drivers for Food Safety Research Agenda were identified through involvement of experts and food system actors and the title of first pilot SRIA core themes were identified.During the third workshop, a process of topics prioritization was conducted which was followed by a 2 months open-consultation period.Out of over 300 participants to the open consultation, 136 respondents covered all eight core themes.The main criteria for ranking topics, to be addressed on short, medium and long terms, were: the emergency and uncertainty.The SRIA is addressing the fragmentation of the Food Safety System, food policy priorities and emerging technologies, taking into account the existing strategic documents launched by EC or different EU initiatives and European Partnerships under Horizon Europe.A particular effort in the SRIA definition was dedicated to the different needs addressed by Food Safety System stakeholders taking into account, in this way, different perspectives.In this respect, in the open consultation, stakeholders from research and academia, policy and non-governmental organizations have been participating, they having different level of responsibility or decisionmaking power within their organization (high, medium and low).