The recognition is given after having competed with other universities, research centres and professionals from the gastronomic sector in Spain. The Food & Health Lab, which is part of the European Network of Living Labs [ENOLL], is a new research concept focused on the user, based on open innovation and real scenarios. This initiative contemplates a series of actions for the promotion of health, healthy and sustainable eating strategies, nutritional intervention and improvement of the quality of life among the dependencies of the University, at a local, national and international level.

Regarding the winning category of food safety, the national award has gone to the work developed to adapt a World Health Organization tool entitled “the five keys to food safety” during the COVID-19 pandemic and that has served as a tool in the food industry, catering services and at home. In fact, this work appears as a “featured article” within the publishing house of scientific journals MDPI.

The work has been developed by the group of José Miguel Soriano del Castillo, Merino Torres, Carla Soler and Nadia San Onofre, which has favoured an interdisciplinary work of professors from the Faculty of Pharmacy and Medicine of the University of Valencia, and researchers of the Materials Science Institute and the Joint Endocrinology, Nutrition and Clinical Dietetics Research Unit-La Fe Health Research Institute-University of Valencia.

On the other hand, and in the category of diets, the selection has fallen on the historical review of weight loss diets from its origins to the 1950s. And which is currently one of the works with the highest views and is part of the doctoral thesis of Inma Zarzo, which was developed through the Italian-Spanish Nutrition Cluster directed by Pietro Boselli, and by the Food & Health Lab of the University of Valencia.

The director of both works, José Miguel Soriano, already won the Gourmand World Cookbook Award in 2016 with the publication entitled El gran libro de la horchata y de la chufa de Valencia, which was the best book in the world in the Best Non Alcoholic Book category and whose Gala was held in Yantai (China).