From 16 to 18 June 2026, the Center of Excellence in Food, Tourism & Leisure (CoEFTL), part of The American College of Greece Research Center (ACG-RC), travelled to Aarhus, Denmark for the International Food Marketing Research Symposium (IFMRS) 2026. Hosted by the MAPP Centre at Aarhus University together with AU Cetera, the symposium brought together researchers, students, and industry voices for three days of presentations and discussion on the future of food marketing.

The City of Smiles, as Denmark’s second largest city is locally known, indeed brought a smile to our delegates’ faces. Aarhus, compact, student-focused, and with a freshly opened university district, offered the symposium an appropriately grounded backdrop for conversations about food, culture, and everyday choices.

About IFMRS

IFMRS is widely regarded as the only dedicated academic forum for food marketing research. It was founded in 2012 by Mark Lang and John Stanton, with Mark chairing and managing the conference from its start at the Haub School of Business, Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Leadership transitioned in 2022 to Klaus G. Grunert and Karen Brunso of the MAPP Centre, School of Business & Social Sciences at Aarhus University, with Polymeros Chrysochou taking over from Karen Brunso in 2025. It welcomes multidisciplinary work spanning consumer behavior, marketing strategy, agribusiness, pricing, advertising and promotion, and sustainability and ethics.

IFMRS 2026 marked a homecoming of sorts: the conference returned to MAPP for the first time in over ten years, following its previous stint in Aarhus back in June 2014. Fittingly, this year also coincided with MAPP’s 35th anniversary, giving the welcome sessions an added sense of celebration.

Themes and highlights from the sessions

Sessions across the two main days covered a wide range of ground, including sustainable retailing and choice architecture, origin and territorial value, healthy diets, farming systems and agricultural innovation, food waste and circular systems, sustainable consumption behavior, storytelling and branding, sustainability labels, alternative protein adoption, livestock and cultural consumption, digital food systems and AI, and organic and traditional consumption. As in recent years, sustainability continued to dominate the agenda, a shift that Klaus G. Grunert noted has been building steadily since the conference’s early focus on health.

A few moments stood out. Hanne Kragh, Acting Head of the Department of Management at Aarhus University’s School of Business & Social Sciences, welcomed delegates into the university’s newly opened auditorium and encouraged attendees to explore both the historic and newly inaugurated parts of the campus. Jessica Aschemann-Witzel, Director of the MAPP Centre, framed the symposium as a gathering of like-minded researchers working to create synergies between academic insight and industry practice. Polymeros Chrysochou, coordinator at MAPP and a Visiting Fellow at CoEFTL, opened the conference with a simple invitation: “Let the conversations begin”!

The opening session also paused to honor the memory of John L. Stanton (1945–2025), a long-time food marketing professor whose work centered on a deceptively simple question: how can food marketing make good, healthy choices easier rather than harder? Ekaterina Salnikova from NEOMA Business School reminded the room of his challenge to an industry that too often confuses consumers (“cyanide is natural too”, he liked to point out) and his conviction that any conversation about technology should start with people. It was a fitting reminder as this year’s delegates debated whether new technologies genuinely serve consumers, and whether academic research is reaching far enough beyond academia.

Closing the symposium, Klaus G. Grunert reflected on how the quality and coherence of submitted papers has grown since the first IFMRS in Philadelphia in 2012. He also noted that this year’s 22 participating countries, while a rich mix, remain a modest number. Geopolitical circumstances kept US-based researchers away this time around, something he hopes will change in future editions.

CoEFTL’s contribution: rethinking how we introduce alternative proteins

CoEFTL came to this year’s symposium with a bit of extra context: it was CoEFTL, through the ACG-RC, that hosted IFMRS 2025 in Athens. If you’d like a sense of what that gathering looked like and how it compares to this year’s edition in Aarhus, see the vibes of last year’s IFMRS. This year, CoEFTL was represented in Aarhus by Executive Director Athanasios Krystallis, Visiting Fellow Polymeros Chrysochou (who was also part of the host team as a member of the MAPP Centre), and research assistant Stavroula Ziavras, who presented the team’s latest study.

The paper, “From Awareness to Adoption? Testing Gradual Choice Editing and Gain-Framed Messaging for Alternative Proteins in a University Canteen Setting”, was co-authored by Stavroula Ziavras, Toula Perrea, Athanasios Krystallis, and Polymeros Chrysochou. Conducted within the EU-funded LIKE-A-PRO project, the study examined whether gradually reducing meat options in a Greek university canteen, paired with sensory-led, gain-framed messaging around taste, health, and environmental benefits, could shift awareness, attitudes, and behavioral intentions toward alternative proteins.

The fieldwork ran across three waves in a real canteen setting, tracking over 680 responses. Awareness of alternative proteins rose sharply, but attitudes and behavioral intentions moved far less, with taste and pleasantness consistently rated as the weakest points. A handful of practical takeaways emerged:

• Communicate right. Messaging should be designed to build positive cognitions and minimize anger, since both directly shape consumers’ willingness to try alternatives and their support for expanding plant-based options.
• Soft architecture works better than hard exclusion. “Light-touch” tools (e.g, taste and protein information, clear sustainability labels, cost incentives, and thoughtful visibility) help retain patrons and reduce reactance, compared with removing choices outright.
• Product before promotion. Communication alone cannot carry adoption in a canteen setting. Lasting change depends on the product itself: better taste, better quality, and a fair price.

The research forms part of LIKE-A-PRO, a Horizon Europe project working to mainstream alternative proteins across Europe’s food system. The project is developing new products from sustainable protein sources while engaging consumers through Living Labs in eleven countries, including Greece, where CoEFTL leads the effort through the ACG-RC. The choice-editing approach behind this year’s paper traces back to the original “Meat or Dare!” campaign, run at the ACG canteen in April 2024, and its refined follow-up, the choice editing pilot conducted in October and November 2025.

Thank you

CoEFTL extends its thanks to Klaus G. Grunert and Polymeros Chrysochou for organizing a rich and well-run conference, to the MAPP Centre for hosting, and to AU Cetera for their careful planning of the event. Thank you as well to every participant whose work and questions made for genuinely interesting conversations about food marketing and where the field goes from here.

As Brigitte Schober-Schmutz of the University of Heidelberg announced during the closing session, IFMRS will move on again next year, with Heidelberg set to host the 2027 edition. From Athens, to Aarhus, to Heidelberg, the conversation continues.