Citizen Science for Food Standards Challenges: Programme Review

Citizen science is an umbrella term that describes a variety of ways in which members of the public can participate in science. The main characteristics of the approach are that: citizens are actively involved in research, in partnership or collaboration with scientists or professionals; and there is a genuine outcome, such as new scientific knowledge, conservation action or policy change. Citizen science involves communities participating in data collection or analysis, or other kinds of collaboration, like co-creating research questions and interpreting data. The approach, endorsed by the European Commission for Research, Science and Innovation, allows the communities we serve to be involved in building the evidence-base on which policy decisions are made, and offers wider benefits to participants (such as expanding scientific knowledge). Citizen science can open up engagement with communities who are underrepresented in research. The FSA’s programme of citizen science work builds on collaboration between UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the FSA and Food Standards Scotland, to develop a joined-up approach to tackle the challenges of maintaining safe food in the UK. Key recommendations of this collaboration were to invest in public engagement and citizen science (aligning with UKRI’s commitment to citizen science and participatory research, as outlined in its vision (2010 – 2022)), and to build and strengthen partnerships across the food safety research and innovation community. To inform these aims, the 2021 FSA review ‘Citizen Science and Food’ explored how citizen science methods have previously been applied to FSA research priorities. The review identified a growing body of research and recommended further investment in this area to build capacity and capability, and spread the use of these methods among the food science community. Subsequently, in 2022 the FSA and UKRI(footnote 1) launched the Citizen Science for Food Standards Challenges (Opens in a new window) funding call, for projects that would use citizen science methods to address the FSA’s areas of research interest (ARIs). The aims of the call were to: assess the utility of the citizen science approach in exploring food standards challenges. facilitate the use of citizen science methods, and build capability, in the food policy research community. expand the range of people from outside of academia involved in food policy research. provide learning opportunities to the members of the public involved as citizen scientists. Six projects were awarded funding, each addressing an ARI, exploring topics such as antimicrobial resistance, food hypersensitivity, consumer practices and food safety, and novel plant breeding methods. All projects used citizen science methods to help researchers gather rich information in certain settings or communities. Across the programme, the six projects facilitated collaboration between: 600 citizen scientists, nine universities, 12 partner organisations, four community or specialist advisors and two business representative bodies. These collaborations brought multiple benefits to researchers’, citizen scientists and to the partner organisations, advisors and stakeholders. This report details these, along with key findings from each project, and operational learnings from the programme to inform future work using citizen science methodology. This report outlines preliminary findings from each of the projects and considers the success of the programme overall. Detailed findings from each project will be published in the form of project reports on the FSA website, in sequence with publications in scientific journals.