A bowl of pasta

Technology transfer in the food industry

Developing improved capability to take up new technology is vital to the survival of the food industry in Australia and CSIRO is tackling these issues on a number of fronts.

  • 15 November 2007 | Updated 14 October 2011

The issue

Only a few of Australia’s thousands of food companies have the time and resources to take advantage of the new technologies crucial to advancing their business operations.

For most small to medium enterprises (SMEs), technical innovation can provide a unique and sustainable competitive advantage.

Increasingly it is seen as an investment in future market leadership as the capability to manage technology uptake drives company growth.

Many SMEs cite barriers to invention such as:

  • limited funds and technical resources
  • difficulty finding the right partners
  • capability for managing risks
  • difficulty in identifying the right technology and managing its uptake
  • intellectual property and privacy issues
  • being capable of managing the process.

What we did

Developing improved capability to take up new technology is vital to the survival of the food industry in Australia and CSIRO is tackling these issues on a number of fronts.

  • A process developed by Victorian-based Roma Foods, in collaboration with CSIRO, to make rice and maize gluten-free pasta spirals won the Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology Food Industry Innovation Award in 2007, as well as the 2006 Governor of Victoria Agribusiness Export Award. The research, which was supported by a National Food Industry Strategy Food Innovation Grant, resulted in the first ever single-stage gluten and additive-free pasta line. As a result Roma Foods significantly increased the throughput of their Orgran brand pasta lines.
  • Tamworth farmers approached CSIRO to resolve colour bleaching and brittleness issues that appeared in production of their Bellata Gold range. The collaborative process resulted in high quality pasta manufacture that played a role in the flavoured pasta’s increasingly successful export.
  • Specialty Cereals worked with CSIRO to capture export markets by developing high quality, healthy protein fillets using plant protein. The project scope went from concept development through to product and process development, scale up and commercialisation.
  • Mathematical models were developed at CSIRO to optimise Nutradry’s refractance window drying technology. This allowed the company to develop an optimal drying process for fruit and vegetable ingredients to be incorporated into functional foods.
  • CSIRO worked with Tandou to better extract bioactive ingredients from durum wheat processing waste and incorporate them into pasta.
  • CSIRO has worked with SMEs on short term consulting and long term projects from concept to commercialisation, but the issue remains that accessing and implementing new technology is a challenge for many in the sector. CSIRO has begun a pilot program to address this gap, with support from the Victorian Government. FoodTech, the food SME technology transfer program, will assist from concept definition and proposal preparation through to identifying funding sources and executing projects.

Read about CSIRO Food & Nutritional Sciences.