Student testimonial
Florencia Irena Kurniawan – Master Food Quality Management
Florencia obtained her BSc degree in Food Technology in Indonesia, after which she became a research assistant for four years. However, she already started thinking about MFQ in her BSc thesis.
Sometimes, the managerial approach is more affordable than the technological approach.
“I worked on cocoa fermentation. I put lactic acid bacteria in during the fermentation, to prevent mould growth. However, I noticed that not all the people working on this fermentation process have the knowledge on food hygiene. After we would ferment, they would put the cocoa to dry on a big cloth on the floor, where chickens could pass by! So, the lactic acid was useless because of that. I started thinking, it might be better to use a management approach first, before going with the technological approach. We need to train the people and pick the right tools to use! Then I saw the MFQ website and thought this would be the answer I needed.”
The programme
Florencia picked the specialisation in User-Oriented Food Quality, and she is very satisfied with that choice. “I like the teachers, and I like the real, practical experience we gain in courses.” Even though she likes her compulsory courses, there is one course that she picked herself that stood out for her, called Advanced Qualitative Approaches for Consumer Studies. “The reason is that we do not only get theory in that course, we practiced a lot with the approaches. Because of that, it becomes much easier to connect it to the real world.”
She also liked Food Quality Management Research Principles. “That one is the easiest to connect to the reason I wanted to do MFQ. We learned about quality issues, and that they can be solved from a managerial and a technological approach, and they can be combined into a techno managerial approach. Using the managerial approach might be better for some problems, as it is in general more affordable.”
The future
After summer, she will start doing her thesis, and her topic is not fully clear yet. “It will be a consumer study on Indonesian heritage food. I am hoping I will be interviewing people, but as it is a consumer study, I will have to find participants that know about Indonesian food, like Indonesians who are living here, in the Netherlands.”
After that, it is only the internship that is left, for which she already has some plans. “I want to try to do my internship in an organisation like the United Nations or the FAO. I do not know if they will have vacancies for consumer-oriented students like me. Another option could be to do consumer studies in a big company here in the Netherlands, we’ll see!”