Print | i-grafix.com | Print News | Packaging News | Wide Format news | Australia, New Zealand and Asia Print and Packaging news from Australia, New Zealand and AsiaMondelēz International sees an opportunity in selling Australian food products to the Asian market; but says we must learn to collaborate as an industry and foster home-grown talent to realise the potential profits.
To this end, it has opened a Food Innovation Centre in Ringwood, Victoria, and will this year sponsor 15 students to undertake a new Master of Food and Packaging Innovation with the University of Melbourne.
Nicholas Georges, director of research, development and quality for premium chocolate and dairy in the Asia Pacific with Mondelēz International, speaking at the AIP National Packaging Conference in Sydney, says the Australian industry needs to work together to act as Asia’s food bowl.
He says, “We are at the doorstep of Asia and already have it as a market for many of our primary industries; we export a lot of commodities there, particularly food. As a matter of fact, they can’t get enough of it.
Nicholas Georges, director of research, development and quality for premium chocolate and dairy in the Asia Pacific with Mondelēz International
“China is not an emerging market, it has already has a middle class of 300 million people. Food is probably at the top of the shopping list as people gain affluence. We looked at this and thought yes, there is an opportunity.
“On the flipside, on trend from now to 2020 there is a decrease in jobs in the food manufacturing industry in Australia. For us, this does not compute. Obviously there are reasons: currency, commodities, retailers doing what they do best – crunching margins and making sure they get the best prices for their consumers. As a result, we have an industry that is looking purely at how to survive. We want to break this cycle.
“We had a discussion with the Victorian government said, if you are prepared to back us on a smaller sized project rather than trying to fund the whole industry, we would be prepared to give back within confectionary, and see if on a small scale we can demonstrate how we can work together. Even though we have innovated as an industry in the past, we are a competitive, highly closed industry, and we know that is not working for us. We have to change our approach.”
The company’s Food Innovation Centre aims to use innovation to ‘successfully re-energise our industry,’ he says, and focus on how to reach Asian consumers.
Mondelēz already has a couple of university projects going to gather insights into the Asian market. One programme, with the University of Melbourne, is looking at premium exporting and how the provenance of food can be of value to Asian shoppers. A second, in South Australia, looks at how people select options in-store.
Mondelēz says it will offer the fruits of this research to the wider industry, hosting workshops within the new centre for small to medium enterprises about what the insights mean and how to use them productively.
The company says will not aim for the mass market in its Asian approach, rather Georges says it will target a small percentage of the middle class with high value products that can achieve sufficient margins to cover the cost of export.
Food innovator Nicholas Booker uses a 3D printer to experiment with Easter lines at the Mondelēz Food Innovation Centre in Ringwood, Australia
However, the group is keeping an open mind and says it is ready to innovate to create new products and find better solutions. Five different kinds of 3D printers provide a spectrum of prototyping options in the centre, from fast and dirty models to full colour resin mock-ups.
Georges says, “The scope of this centre is to explore how we can find opportunities and insights, especially in areas we do not understand, and actively translate them into ideas that we can then de-risk by investing in technologies that allow us to rapid prototype, rapid fail, and iterate until we have confidence they will succeed.
“We are quite good as an industry at commercialising, growing and optimising new product design, but we don’t think that is the bigger issue. We need to look at how we deal with finding new opportunities and de-risking them so that more of us are willing to take a risk for innovation.”
To reach the levels of innovation Mondelēz desires, Georges says the industry will need a higher calibre of packaging technology graduates, which it intends to sponsor itself through a new programme with the University of Melbourne.
He says, “We need to get the best brains into our industry to learn innovation within the context of food, and integrate that into every one of our companies.
“We have invited several industry bodies like the AIP to design an industry-wide curriculum. We want to impart the best of what the industry knows, including a practice period with one of our companies working on innovation. Our goal is to deliver the next generation of talent to Australia.”
Mondelēz will sponsor 15 students a year through the first three years of the Master of Food and Packaging Innovation programme, with the first intake in July of this year and graduates entering the workforce in the middle of 2016.
The company will put one year of the programme for each student on its books, which it says is the equivalent of six months’ pay for a graduate employee. As well as students, it is also looking for industry professionals with diverse experience to lecture.
“We want our graduates to come to us as food innovators – for which they will need more than the Bachelor degree. We need the best staff, the best minds.
“It is clear to us that no matter who you are in this industry, you do not have all the answers you require to bring big innovation to life, and certainly not on a regional scale. We need to find a way to work together.”
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