Food Industry Additive

Attack on Ready Meals...again

It's going to be another round of reassuring family and friends, explaining to them that it's alot of hype and hysteria. It was announced over the weekend that Jamie Oliver the UK celebrity chef's next project is to rid the consumers kitchen of ready meals.

"After taking on school dinners and intensively-reared chicken and battery eggs, Oliver will attempt to change the way the country eats at home in his new four-part Channel 4 series."  link

I really hope that it doesn't take the easy option and blame the food industry for putting 'additives' in (which help keep things safe for example) when it's essentially a personal choice that people make. Personally, I like Jamie and have cooked his recipes many times (without a failure - I wish I could say that about all recipe books) and the work he does in raising awareness of sensible eating and how simple and cheap cooking can be is great. It's the same old story as with everything in life - too much is not good for you - so come on Jamie - push that balance is the key and whatever you do, don't hit the food industry too hard.

.....I'm justing dreaming Marks & Spencer extend their reach to the midwest in the future as I am partial to the occasional ping myself!

(See here for a separate article on this same subject from 2005).
 

Skill shortages in the UK Food Industry

When I first came across this I thought yes, I know there's a skill shortage. But looking into this further I was shocked to read some of the statistics that face the UK Food industry.

The UK employs over half a million people in the industry and turnover is approx 74 billion GBP. Sounds ok, but when you consider that the food and drink manufacturing sector is the largest manufacturing sector in the UK, and the ONLY manufacturing sector that is growing the following statistics are worrying.

The National Skills Academy states that 28% of employees have basic skills (can only read/write/count to the level of a 10 year old!), and 1 in 4 food scientist roles are vacant. Why the lack of food scientist's in the industry, I don't know if anyone from Reading or Manchester etc reads this but are your courses full?

To help counter this the NSA has been set up to try and address the problem and stem the flow of manufacturing jobs to other parts of the world.  I hope the funding and will is sufficient to deal with this, from my viewpoint anyone wanting to get into manufacturing should see the food industry as one of the few sectors that has to succeed. Everyone's got to eat and population is growing giving more chance of job stability than other areas.

I also wondered what's changing the views of technologists in the industry. From my experience I have seen a switch in the sales people employed in the industry over the last 20 years. When I started out in technical the sales people were not generally from a technical background and more 'out and out' sales people. The trend certainly moved (as did I) from starting in R&D and then moving on to sales as the role / market adapted to one where customers wanted someone who could deal with technical and sales questions.

It could also just be down to cash...does the industry appreciate the true value of  a food scientist?