Scottish firms receive funding from Interface Food & Drink to accelerate innovation

Interface Food & Drink (IFD) has granted £75,000 to fund three collaborative projects between Scottish food and drink companies and Scottish universities, as part of its efforts to drive research and innovation in Scotland’s food and drink industry.

IFD encourages partnerships between businesses and academics in order to accelerate innovation through knowledge exchange in the food and drink sector, which contributes more than £10bn to the country’s economy annually.

The funding will be provided to Mara Seaweed, Devro and Lightbody Group, which have been announced as the recipients of the inaugural Interface Food & Drink Innovation Competition.

Each company will receive a £25,000 grant, which will be used to support the collaborative projects with leading academics in the food and drink industry, in order to achieve economic impact and accelerate innovation and the adoption of new technologies within the sector.

The three companies met the criteria set by experts from Scotland’s food and drink businesses, including supply chain efficiencies, cost and manufacturing effectiveness, energy and sustainability, new technologies and establishing and developing new global market opportunities.

Interface Food & Drink national co-ordinator Helen Pratt said that accelerating innovation and development through collaborative projects helps to ensure the continued growth of Scotland’s food and drink sector.

"With support from the Scottish Funding Council, the three competition winners will now embark on six to nine month collaborative projects with some of Scotland’s best academic institutions, accessing the expertise and experience of academics in the fields in which they aim to develop," Pratt added.

Scottish Funding Council interim chief executive Laurence Howells said: "This programme illustrates the value of SFC’s investment in the ground-breaking work Interface is doing with food and drink businesses and university research departments."

Mara Seaweed, based in Edinburgh, sells a range of seaweed products made from seasonal seaweeds sourced from Scottish and Irish regions.

It will use the fund on a research project to determine the commercial and technical feasibility of farming and processing a sustainable supply of edible seaweed, and will work in partnership with the University of the Highlands and Islands, and the Scottish Association of Marine Science.

North Lanarkshire-based Devro is a supplier of collagen food casings, and it will utilise the grant to support the development of mechanical and finite element modelling of collagen casing in association with Glasgow University.

The project is the first in the country to make use of complex mathematical models, based on research into biological tissues, in the development of sausage casings.

Lightbody Group, based in Hamilton, is part of Finsbury Food, which is a leading supplier of premium cakes in the UK.

The company will use the funds to support the development of hyperspectral imaging for the assessment of the quality and longevity of baked food products – a technology which is not yet implemented in the bakery industry – in partnership with Strathclyde University.

IFD is a five-year project which will run until July 2016, and it covers the whole of Scotland geographically and the entire food chain from primary agriculture/fishing to production and processing through to retail and export.

Interface is funded by the Scottish Funding Council, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and European Regional Development Fund.