The European funded research project ‘Creating Entrepreneurs in Food’ (CEF) held its third ‘Roadshow’ in Warsaw, Poland, on 12^th October 2018. The project partners from Poland, Ireland, Belgium and the UK organised the event which aimed to evaluate the Web Portal designed to support young farmers across Europe. About 20 agriculture and academic representatives and 50 students studying agriculture businesses attended the event.

The overall aim of the CEF project is to encourage more young farmers across Europe to stay within farming, and in particular, by supporting innovation, providing entrepreneurship training to young farmers, and by the promotion of shorter supply chains from farm to consumer.

The ‘Roadshow’ day was filled with a variety of scheduled activities, including:

• Presentations by guest speakers from the ‘Friendly Farmer’ organisation in Ireland, the European Council for Young Farmers (CEJA) in Belgium, and the Polish Beef Association (PBA). Topics of presentations included the journey from farmer to food entrepreneur; EU measures to help young farmers get started; trends in food business - local products from known sources, and how to build own-brands of a food producer in a competitive market.
• Presentation from Professor Yanqing Duan, the University of Bedfordshire, on one of the project’s main outputs: the CEF Web Portal. The UoB project team has been responsible for creating the web portal’s design and its implementation, with content provided by all partner organisations.
• Group discussion and feedback from attendees on the web portal.
• Panel discussion of the benefits and potential of food entrepreneurship as a career opportunity across Europe.

At the end of the event all participants were invited to complete a formal evaluation form concerning the usability of the web portal. The project team will be working on improving the web portal based on the evaluation feedback.

The whole event was very well organised by Polish Beef Association, including the provision of high quality of simultaneous translation between Polish and English and vice versa.

Note: The CEF project was launched in January 2017. The final part of the project and official launch of the web portal is scheduled to take place in Ireland in early 2019. For more information on this project, please visit the website: www.creatingentrepreneursinfood.eu