Food-related Innovation: Technology, Genetics and Consumer Impacts
Special Issue of Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice
Volume 10 Issue 1 July 2008
ii+134 pages ISBN 978-1-921348-21-1
Editors:
Paul J Moughan
Riddet Institute, Massey University
Palmerston North, New Zealand
Christine M Bruhn
Centre for Consumer Research
Department of Food Science and Technology
University of California-Davis, United States of America
Coordinating Editor
Judith L Mercure
Calibre Communications, Sydney NSW
What most consumers know about food-related innovation comes from the popular media. These sources focus on contentious topics such as biofuel cultivation displacing crops, expensive and environmentally unsound 'food miles', retailer power favouring agribusiness at the expense of small-scale farming, genetically manipulated organisms creating unanticipated threats to human health, among other subjects. That these subjects are critically important for investigation and debate is self-evident. But they are only part of a story.
A more balanced perspective on innovation explores initiatives that ensure the safety of our processed food products (eg pasteurization), research that marries individual genetic disease profiles with appropriately customized diets, and convenience for time-poor families, among other subjects. These subjects are as essential to efforts to develop a sound model for industrial innovation as those currently dominating the media are contentious.
This special issue of IMPP brings together perspectives of a number of processed food industry experts who focus on different facets of food-related innovation. As these experts know, innovation in the food industry is a tough game, played out in an often tense arena where the regulations that aim to ensure our foods are safe and healthy are applied to scientific and technological developments, against an often contradictory backdrop of consumer concerns, worries and perceptions. Successful food-related innovations are the products of the tension between these forces.
The dynamic between these powerful forces is represented in this issue by section editors with strong backgrounds in food-related technology (Massey University Professor Paul Moughan); consumer concerns (University of California Davis Professor Christine Bruhn); and food safety and regulatory issues (Dr Elizabeth Szabo and Dr Patricia Desmarchelier, Chief Scientist of New South Wales Safe Food Authority and Senior Principal Research Scientist at Food Science Australia respectively).
The issue is opened with a review of Human and Organisational Factors Affecting Technology Uptake by Industry by Peter Roupas (Head, Knowledge Management Section, Food Science Australia, Werribee VIC, Australia). This is followed by an introduction to Food Supply Chains and Recent Growth in Global Activity by Peter J Lillford (Honorary Chair in Public Understanding of Science, CNAP - Department of Biology, University of York; Director, National Non-Food Crops Centre, Innovation Centre, University of York, UK).
This special issue of Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice focuses on three topic aspects of food-related innovation, namely, technology, genetics and consumer impacts. Section One focuses on food technologies, including articles on topics such as the function of food, the tension between individual nutrition and mass food customization, the issues of genomics, nutrigenetics and nutrigenomics, and emerging food processing technologies. Section Two explores consumer impacts on innovation in the food industry. Articles examine the role that consumer magazines play in communicating food-related innovations to consumers and summarises the contribution of foods to health in the future.
Taken together, the contributions in this issue remind us that food-related innovation is critically important, deserving balanced investigation and intensive debate by the consumer groups, scientists, policy makers, producers, processors and distributors, as well as innovation experts and the general community.
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