19 February 2025

Food for the future

Advances in innovation across the food sector play a key role in maintaining Ireland’s status as a food exporter, explains Mark Fenelon, Head of Teagasc’s Food Programme at Ashtown and Moorepark.

Facilities at Teagasc’s Food Research Centres have the potential to help Ireland maintain its reputation as a major food exporter. Credit: Andrew Downes

Future innovation within our food system will undoubtedly involve new technologies, methodologies and science to drive transformation in food production, processing and consumption. Research will need to embrace advanced data analytics to drive efficiency, sustainability and resilience within our food sector. To achieve this, our focus is on maintaining core food science principles while facilitating the introduction of the latest developments in science and engineering.

The concept of sustainable food systems includes diversification, nutrition, sustainable packaging and processing efficiency across all food sectors. This is underpinned by food safety, sensory, quality and health benefits, which are integral to any food system.

The Teagasc Food Research Programme is uniquely positioned to look across the value chain from soil to ingredient and, ultimately, the finished food product. Since Ireland is an exporting country, it is highly relevant to our work that we understand consumer trends in global markets, and the nutritional and functional attributes of the ingredients or foods we produce.

Creating new value

Research has evolved to support diversification within our food system, creating new value streams and increasing bio-circularity by valorising crop-, animal-, and marine-based biomass into novel or renewable products.

The conversion to biomaterials for food and non-food applications is made possible through molecular and processing techniques. New and existing processing strategies can be integrated for protein and residual biomass extraction, fractionation, concentration and drying. Coupled with the development of biobanks for microbiome and enzyme biotransformation, this will ultimately determine the extent of capability and thus circularity by creating new food value streams.

“Alongside advances in molecular sciences, this knowledge and technology can be applied to the nutrition, functionality and safety of the food we consume.”

Moreover, to innovate in food product and process design, we need to be able to measure what we study. Advanced instrumentation and Artificial Intelligence analytical tools will continue to be a key focus of our research.

The integration of digital solutions doesn’t stop there; vision recognition, robotics, mixed reality, generative AI and advanced data analytics are applicable across the food programme.

The Industrial Internet of Things supports sensor development and edge computing and can transform manufacturing processes. It has the potential to re-engineer food manufacturing to better meet changing consumer demand.

A convergence of technologies is happening, generating a new understanding of complex food structures and behaviour during processing, storage and digestion. Alongside advances in molecular sciences, this knowledge and technology can be applied to the nutrition, functionality and safety of the food we consume.

The Teagasc food programme team will continue to collaborate extensively with the other Teagasc programmes and external collaborators to develop Ireland’s natural food resources and, ultimately, its economic and nutritional needs.