Member Article

Sheffield Hallam Alcontrol labs receive £75k funding for healthy food innovation

Sheffield Hallam University’s Alconrol Laboratories has won £75k funding from the Technology Strategy Board for their project aimed at the provision of safe and healthy foods.

The BBSRC and Scottish Enterprise are also funding the grant which will enable Alcontrol to automate food safety screening, in the wake of events such as the horsemeat scandal.

Current methods for measuring contaminants in foodstuffs are often slow and costly. In this project, fast and robust parallel measurements of multiple food samples for important contaminants will be investigated.

This will be achieved by using high throughput laboratory robots to carry out unattended sample preparation for high performance, thin layer chromatography.

The proposed technique should also prove invaluable in emergency situations when large numbers of samples need to be screened to determine which samples are contaminated and which product batches should be withdrawn.

The Technology Strategy Board, together with the BBSRC and Scottish Enterprise, invested up to £8.5m in collaborative projects.

In addition, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Food Standards Agency and the Medical Research Council consideredr co-funding opportunities for projects that fall within their strategic priority areas.

Projects had to be business-led; they can be business-to-science or business-to- business: academics can apply only as a partner in a consortium.

Where academic partners are involved, their costs must be no greater than 30% of the total project costs, meaning that at least 70% of the project costs will be incurred by the business partner(s).

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Clare Burnett .