Special ingredient: innovating Scotland's food

Scotland’s first food innovation centre opened in December at Edinburgh’s Queen Margaret University (QMU). Speaking at the launch, James Withers, chief executive of Scotland Food & Drink, said: “Relationships between the industry and Scotland’s universities are critical. My ambition is this new centre will provide producers with intelligence and support, to help them create exciting new products and in turn find new customers.”
The Scottish Centre for Food Development & Innovation (SCFDI) built on a growing reputation at QMU for working with the food and drink industry. Dr Jane McKenzie, Dietician and Senior Lecturer in Biochemistry & Metabolism at QMU, is the university’s academic lead for food and drink. “We’ve engaged with over 120 food and drink businesses in the last four years up until the launch,” she says.
The new facilities include a dedicated microbiology laboratory; fully-equipped sensory suite; dedicated chemistry laboratory and a technology room for industry to test new technology. It is estimated a growth in sales of premium health products could be worth an additional £1bn to the Scottish economy by 2017.
McKenzie says the new facilities allow knowledge exchange work to grow, and enables academics to get more comfortable working with industry. Key aims are to support access to the global market for healthy and functional food, and help companies develop their products for a world stage. McKenzie says it is clearly a growth sector. “We now have the ability to be much more adaptable to what a new product development requires, whether from an idea or an old product – whether it be flexibility, adaptability, what the needs of the client are, we’re much better placed,” says McKenzie.
Companies tend to have preconceptions about the market and “media-directed health challenges”, she says, but her team understand emerging problems and solutions, including key ingredients, consumer perceptions or eating habits. “When a company comes to us and says I want to make a low fat sausage, which nobody has yet but they might, we will look to them and say well, what is it about that you want to do? Why do you think that’s important? What are you aiming for with this? Is it low calories for low fat, or is it heart health, or both of those things? Who are you targeting at, and what drives them? So we can help them to actually better define what their innovation should be, and then obviously in working on the innovation with them, we can ensure they do meet the criteria they were originally aiming for. We rarely do exactly what the company comes to us with.”
Nine companies have approached the SCFDI in the two months since launch, and McKenzie says they already have a better understanding of the remit, and are therefore more open to new ideas. “One of the successes we’ve had at Queen Margaret is we work very much in partnership with the company. We don’t just let them come in and tell us what they want and say ‘do what we think is right’ and walk away; we work very much on developing their ideas and listen to what they’re saying, but we also appreciate the other influences over their decision making. Things like cost, things like how to market it, things like safety, all of those things.”
As someone who has worked in industry as well, McKenzie says it is “very satisfying” to see “the real difference you can make with a piece of state-of-the-art research, then see a tiny bit of it being applied in a small company in East Lothian or something. It’s brilliant.”

"It’s very much more a partnership. I believe that’s where the growth is going to be in the future"

Scotland has 12,000 small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in the food and drink sector and the growing market for healthy food and drink products is estimated to be worth £20bn in the UK and more than £300bn globally.
While most of the centre’s work has been focused on small enterprises, McKenzie says larger companies have started to show an interest. “They’re coming round to the idea we don’t need to work on R&D on our own, we don’t need to contract R&D out, i.e. go to a university and say ‘do this for us, we’ll pay you’, it’s very much more a partnership. I believe that’s where the growth is going to be in the future,” she says.
A new degree, the BSc (Hons) Nutrition and Food Science has been launched at QMU, and will receive its first intake of students in September.
The degree focuses on human nutrition and food science with an emphasis on health and the prevention of dietary-related disease, which reflects the increased focus on nutrition reflected in the work of the SCFDI. The aim of the new programme is to produce graduates who have the transferable knowledge, skills and attributes to add value to the UK and global food industry. 
Dr Fiona Coutts, Dean of Health Sciences at Queen Margaret University, said: “The creation of this new course pays tribute to QMU’s history in food and nutrition. In 1875, the institution was established to help address the dietary issues of the urban poor, confirming our commitment to improving quality of life.”