Evolution of the Food Innovation Centre - Part One
Posted on 02 September 2026
Alice Jones, Senior Food Innovation Advisor, Food Innovation Centre
Reflecting on the last 10 years working with the Food and Drink Industry
This article was written by Senior Food Innovation Advisor, Alice Jones as part of the Food Innovation Centre’s 10-year anniversary blog series.
Sometimes the best things in life grow up and evolve authentically and organically. That is my experience with our FIC. I guess I would say that though, wouldn’t I, being an Agri-Food Scientist.
In fact, the academic and technical staff of the School of Biosciences on the Sutton Bonington campus already had been working collaboratively with the food, drink and farming industries, long before we had an official Food Innovation Centre (FIC). Then in 2016, a European Regional Development Funding (ERDF) helped launch a dedicated team of food science practitioners working 100% with industry to specifically serve the needs of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire food and drink Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).
I arrived at the newly formed FIC to bring a Sensory Science specialism to the team, with 12 years of experience in various technical and R&D roles in the SME food and drink sector. I remember the absolute elation of having ‘crossed to the other side of the fence’. I had the chance to work alongside three other Food Scientists and Technical Specialists from completely different backgrounds and specialisms - one from multiple food manufacturing roles, with an NPD and Marketing background; a Brewing Specialist from the beer industry; and the third with Food Physics and Engineering training. I had also just gained access to a plethora of knowledge with the academic colleagues around me in Food, Nutritional and Sensory Sciences, Plant, Animal and Agricultural Sciences, Engineering … and beyond. Not to mention the access to numerous analytical laboratories and pilot-scale equipment to ‘play with’ in the Food Processing Facility and Pilot Brewery. This is one of the many reasons why I have been in the role so long. With Food Science being such a wide topic, and thus the questions we get from industry being so far reaching, I still find it very empowering that we can call on any department University-wide to find the knowledge, expertise and solutions required. That is why the first SME support service we ran for D2N2 (Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire region) was called ‘Enabling Innovation’. The funding allowed us to deliver a defined package of consultancy for eligible businesses for free, enabling us to contribute to the economic development of the local food and drink sector.
Those initial years were dominated by projects around sugar replacement (with the Soft Drinks Industry Levy being implemented in the UK in 2018) and making vegan versions of conventional products. Gluten-free lines were all the rage too. The influence of messaging on the internet and social media was just beginning to happen; with this came a spike in consumer (and thus start-up/ small business owner) confusion about what constituted ‘healthy eating’, versus serving consumer groups with specific dietary needs linked to clinically diagnosed allergies or intolerances. That was most evident for the themes of lactose-free and gluten-free products. In response, with our Nutritional Sciences and Dietetic academic colleagues, in 2018 we ran a day-long workshop to ‘myth bust’ the purpose of gluten-free and lactose-free products, and to understand nutritional labelling claims on packaging, with tips on how to differentiate between products for those with allergies and those with dietary preferences. To this day we still play that role of signposting to best practice and being the providers of scientific and evidence-based advice; something that I think is needed more than ever now with the rise of misinformation.
With that in mind, and with the themes of Healthy Eating and Sustainable Food Production - in particular the valorisation of food and drink ‘waste’, or by-products -becoming key areas of focus for government policy, in 2018, two post-doctoral researchers joined our team to proactively create resources and workshops to communicate and translate the latest scientific research findings for business applications. In parallel, the demand for start-up, micro and small business support beyond the funded support available increased, which motivated us to work with our Food Science academic colleagues to link groups of undergraduate and master’s students with local businesses to support their new product development module. This proved to be a win-win for local businesses and for the technical and soft skill development of the next generation of Food Scientists studying at UoN, and something that is firmly part of Food and Drink degree courses today.
Every year, FIC technologists provide mentorship to students as they interact with companies to work on their real-life briefs. This is when we started using the term ‘added value’ at the FIC; meaning going above and beyond income generation for wider benefit, through outreach, public speaking and using an educational and co-creation approach to our consultancy, rather than just offering outsourced technical support. It has been a pleasure to have many interns and work experience students working with us at FIC over the years.
In the pre-Covid years of FIC, we also delivered seven workshops for industry; from utilising food waste, Sensory Evaluation Techniques, to beer taint identification and more.
Between 2019 and 2020, with a gap in funding for FIC, our original team disbanded but I and a colleague stayed to bid for new funds. Meanwhile, fuelled by a challenge from the drinks industry to ‘secure the future elderflower supply chain’, working with academics in Agricultural and Plant Science departments, we set up a research stream investigating cultivation strategies and practices for elder (Sambucus nigra) - a business-led research stream which is still ongoing today, and led to the establishment of an elder tree selections trial plot on the University’s farm. We have been able to report data from a 6-year selections trial on fresh weight flower yield (at the International Elderberry Conference in Missouri, US in 2025) and collected data on multiple other aspects influencing elder tree production. These included: the effect of pruning, architecture of selections, biodiversity of associated insect species, propagation, and stress priming techniques to infer drought tolerance, all of which get directly applied on farm, to the growing number of farmers and landowners using our consultancy services as they diversify their operations. The whole project has been a great example of how the diverse disciplines at UoN can be harnessed to respond to food industry questions that are farm-to-fork in nature. This has taken me from making measurements out in the field, all the way to our Food Processing Facility and chemistry labs to make extractions from the flowers to the booths of our Sensory Science Centre to test final products on consumers. We were able to use a two-pronged strategy of developing solutions to produce more elder in the UK long-term as well as providing short-term solutions in the form of knowledge on how to use the raw material already available more efficiently.
Our second round of ERDF funding awarded in 2021, saw us re-launch our funded support service to SMEs further with the ‘Driving Research and Innovation’ era. In this era, Healthy Eating was still an important topic, but by then the idea of personalised nutrition was emerging. This led to us being part of a Europe-wide project, ‘Pioneering Innovative Food for Seniors’, which culminated in knowledge transfer to industry in the form of a ‘Healthy Eating for the Older Generation’ workshop and an online course entitled ‘. Requests to aid the development of ‘functional’ food and drink products was characteristic of this era, as was developing alternative protein products, from plant, fungal or insect-based sources.
In the second part, Alice discuss the impact of Brexit to the food and drink industry, the trends that have emerged and the support we offered to help mitigate these challenges and adapt to industry changes. Read part two here.