Industry Day: Food Innovation for Delivering Health, Nutrition and Wellness
Industry Day took place on Friday 18th January with a record breaking 130 attendees ranging from industry to academics to postgraduate researchers.
The theme of the event focused on Food Innovation for Delivering Health as well as Nutrition and Wellness.
The purpose of Industry Day, held at Weetwood Hall, is for industry and academia to meet, network and discuss potential collaborations and it is a real opportunity to review state of the art research focused on delivering health benefit through food products.
Some of the industry representatives who attended the event included: Nestle, Kraft Heinz, Kellogg’s, Sainsbury’s, McCain’s, Warburton’s, PepsiCo, Cranswick, and Campden BRI.
Here are some of the speakers/ highlights of the event:
Deciphering food oral processes for optimal food structure development
Dr. Benjamin Le Révérend, Nestlé Research Centre, Switzerland
Designing nutritious food for the older person
Kelly Fortune, Apetito UK
The future of food
Dr. Bruce Linter, Pepsico R&D, UK
An Industry-Academia Engagement panel was also held on the day chaired by Prof. Alan R. Mackie (University of Leeds), Lee Reece (Kraft Heinz), Dr. Hugh Powell (Nestlé), Step Morris (University of Leeds).
Dr Anwesha Sarkar from the University of Leeds says of the event:
With more than 130 delegates, the biennial event of Leeds Industry Day of School of Food Science and Nutrition was once again a great success. Spent quite a few years in industry myself, I am very passionate about this event as it is a unique gateway to foster successful academia-industry collaborations. This year, the event was really engaging with a good balance of industry and academic talks, demonstrations, exciting research pitches by our PhD students, posters on latest research findings. It was reassuring to see that our scientific wealth of interdisciplinary research outputs was highly appreciated by our delegates and we also identified some interesting synergy with industrial research challenges. In this year’s Leeds Industry day, we introduced an industry-academic panel discussion, which was extremely stimulating. This gave us a lot of insights for early engagement of industrial partners, which can help to accelerate the translation of our blue sky research into innovative products and services.
