During this workshop, held as part of a joint Nutrition Society and Food Standards Agency (Agency) meeting on Micronutrient interactions and public health, several precepts for a successful funding application to the Agency were discussed. These precepts, many of which can be used as guiding principles for project proposals to other funding bodies, are summarised as follows: remember that the Agency only supports research that will help them formulate or change human food policy; read the research requirements document thoroughly and plan your project to answer the call; remember that the Agency issues contracts, not grants; your project will be just one project within a focused and coordinated programme; collaborative work is encouraged, but this type of approach is not a licence to double or treble your costs; write a one-page executive summary and attach it to the front of the form; the statistical basis for your experimental design and proposed statistical analysis of your results are important criteria in the evaluation of your proposal; your plans for dissemination and exploitation are very important; match your project duration against your research plan; abide by the Agency plan for quality assurance for the management of research; make full use of the programme adviser and the Agency policy contact and the ‘feedback’ stage to refine your scientific ideas in line with Agency policy.