7th November 2017: Rosina Borrelli and Kelly Reed from the IFSTAL team headed to the 2nd Annual Food and Drink Engineering & Processing Summit held at the Ricoh Arena, Coventry.
The event was organised by Food and Drink Business Europe, a long established business magazine for the food and drink processing industries in the UK and Europe. The summit aimed to bring together senior management and technical experts from the UK’s food and beverage manufacturers and this year added topical areas such as sustainability and craft food. A wide range of speakers and exhibitors from leading food and beverage manufacturing companies showcased new technology and systems to support the industry. These ranged from: processing, plant management, filling and packaging, lean, production, to building services, automation, facilities management, maintenance, continuous improvement and energy management.
With food manufacturing growing in the UK but the number of food engineers required yet to be in place, there are many safety and quality considerations that would not be present in usual heavy manufacturing. The use of food-grade cleaning equipment in bright blue definitely caught our eye! In addition at the other end of the spectrum, entrepreneurs with “kitchen-table” ideas also need to be supported to develop products at a level of safety and quality demanded by the industry. We spoke with the team representing the Quadram Institute, (previously known as the Institute of Food Research) who produce the industry reference bible: McCance and Widdowson’s Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset (CoFID) and who also made us aware of some really interesting vacancies they currently have available: https://quadram.ac.uk/vacancies-listing/?job_category[]=science.
Watch this space for new connections and internships in the coming months.
Blog by Kelly Reed (IFSTAL Education Coordinator, University of Warwick) and Rosina Borrelli (IFSTAL Workplace Engagement Lead).
Image credit: Sustainable Food and Beverage Conference image website header.
