Lucía Frez

Lucía is a PhD candidate in the Food Quality and Design group at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) in The Netherlands. She completed her bachelor degree in Biotechnology Engineering and a MSc in Plant Biotechnology at Andres Bello University (Chile). It was a fantastic experience, but throughout her studies she realised that the topic she felt more passionate about was foods and how food quality was being assessed and achieved by the food industry. Therefore, she successfully applied to the MSc in Food Quality Management at WUR. After obtaining her masters degree with the support of a Chilean scholarship, she was awarded another personal fellowship to pursue a PhD at WUR.

Lucía’s PhD project aims to unravelling the role of product familiarity and its relationship to food acceptance. Product familiarity reflects the set of experiences that a consumer has had with a product throughout his/her lifetime, such as knowledge, preparation and consumption. Currently, it is hard to determine what attributes should an unfamiliar dish have in order to be home-cooked by consumers. In this respect, Lucía is studying the trade-offs made by consumers when preparing a known vs. an unknown dish to elicit and/or increase consumer’s acceptance towards less familiar dishes. The results of this project will help to (i) promote variability in consumer’s diets by increasing their familiarity when home-cooking new dishes, and (ii) to develop food products that meet their needs and wishes.