DAIRY SPECIAL I n d u s t r y P e r s p e c t i v e … COLIN BROWN OF FONTERRA By Robert Mitchell www.foodtechnology.co.nz 19 The headlines are confronting: Dairy industry under pressure. Farmers face uncertain future. But Fonterra research engineer Colin Brown is having none of it. He’s selling a story of positivity and there should be plenty of buyers. “It’s probably fair to say we are in a pretty deep trough at the moment,” Brown says, “but we should not lose sight of the fact that the dairy industry has an ability to make good money in the future and that there are people around who are keen, willing and able to assist that process.” People like Brown and his food engineering team-mates at the Fonterra Research and Development Centre in Palmerston North. “We’re not talking about business as usual,” he says, “it’s about what a process or a factory or a product might look like in five, 10, 20 years’ time and how we move to that target - it’s the step-changes in technology or product development that we should be aiming for.” Brown has a vested interest in that future. He started with Fonterra on November 16 last year. He knows that date well because his first child - daughter Samantha – was born a week later. Before that he earned a food engineering degree at Massey University and was offered some summer research work with Heinz in Hastings, which led on to a PhD in association with the university. Brown used mathematical modelling to help predict how quickly fats could go off in different products. That led to a bit of lecturing and consulting, before he was offered some post-doctoral work with Fonterra. “It was centred on applications of baking pizzas with a focus on determining how the process of baking alters the cheese and trying to have some way of saying if you have these processes you will have this kind of response. So it was an engineering approach to trying to decipher what was happening in baking in fairly complex systems,” Brown says. He liked the idea of applying his research and knowledge to commercial aims. “I enjoy the fact that you’ve got something tangible out of the commercial route, whether that be a change to a piece of kit or a new piece of kit or processing or a new product, you have something tangible there and it’s measurable in dollars. Those are the things you get out of bed for.” Brown’s work, and that of many others, means that at least 25 other people get out of bed each day to go to jobs created by the $72 million expansion of Fonterra’s Clandeboye mozzarella factory. His current research has built on Fonterra’s earlier development of mozzarella, one of its more successful high-value products. Before he was working on the baking. Now it’s about maintaining top-class performance as production is scaled up. Much of his work is funded by the Transforming the Dairy Value Chain Primary Growth Partnership (PGP) programme, a sevenyear, $170 million innovation programme involving the Ministry for Primary Industries and commercial partners, including DairyNZ and Fonterra. “I’m responsible for fitting a process to a product,” says Brown, “so the types of things we are thinking about on a daily basis are what are my operations, what do they do, how can I influence them and what is the influence on the product, how can I take it to scale, how can I take it to, (in my case), Clandeboye? So that’s sort of the holy grail.” For Brown that might involve mathematical modelling, hands-on engineering or working with staff at Fonterra’s pilot plant, where products and processes can be trialled and tweaked before they make it to the bigger factories. “You have to have the pilot plant because in the processes we are dealing with, scaling up is one of the most difficult things we can do. You can’t go from a kitchen scale to Clandeboye, the risk is just massive; at least we must know what the risks are.” Brown and his colleagues believe those risks are worth taking when considering the potential returns. “I, as well as the other technologists, engineers and scientists here, are really focused on how to add value, how to get more out of milk; it’s always about how do I shift it from a milk-powder equivalent price to cheese and other highvalue products. Certainly the mozzarella area seems to be pretty high value.”
FT AUG 16
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