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Background

Headquartered in Glenbervie near Stonehaven, Scotland, Macphie is the UK’s leading, independent, added-value food ingredients manufacturer, and has been producing premium quality food ingredients and solutions for customers across 40 countries for over 85 years.

Challenge

The company approached Interface to seek help in finding relevant academic collaborators to provide solutions to a range of challenges facing their business. These ranged from reducing saturated fat content and creating “cleaner label” products to rethinking their packaging and storage.
 

Solution

Interface has facilitated a series of collaborative projects with numerous Scottish Universities to support the business challenges.

Project areas have included:

To date, Macphie has been involved in more than 15 individual collaborative research projects with multiple universities which have yielded cost savings to the business of many hundreds of thousands of pounds.
 

Business benefits

“Innovation is a cornerstone for Macphie, developing new technologies, products, processes and packaging to add value to our business and better meet our customer needs.

Macphie utilises Interface as a Scottish brokering service that brings businesses and universities together. Interface has facilitated a series of collaborative projects across a range of business requirements with Scottish universities. Using the Interface network, we have managed to completely accelerate our innovation agenda.

At Macphie we now have a rich heritage of academic projects across many aspects of our business. These translate into shaping and driving our innovation agenda. Interface is a crucial partner in enabling us to pair up with the very best academic organisations to achieve success. Our ongoing outlook is to continue to invest resources in long-term, transformational projects to ultimately add even greater value to our customer offering.” Martin Ruck, Macphie’s Head of Research and Development.

Academic benefits

Following a successful masters project with Abertay University on computer and web Enabled Food Product Evaluation System:

“Abertay has a specific interest in pursuing links with industry as part of the University’s Strategic Plan. The work with Macphie is an excellent example of how Abertay can be recognised for developing graduates equipped with the attributes and attitudes to contribute significantly to future economies. 

The work has also been conducive for developing pathways to impact, allowing Abertay to generate an excellent track record with respect to KE activities that generate further income and reputation for the University.”  Dr Nia White, Head of the Graduate School, Abertay University.

Interface also supported Macphie and the University of Edinburgh to develop and test a series of emulsions to use in a commercial setting. This led on to further studies on the role of fat crystallisation in the process of stabilizing emulsions and foams which enabled the company to increase the unsaturated fats in their products.

“It was very interesting for us to apply our expertise in the physics of emulsion technology to support a company developing healthier products.”
Dr Tiffany Wood, Director of the Edinburgh Complex Fluids Partnership, The University of Edinburgh.

Additional notes

Macphie have worked with the following Universities and Research Institutes: University of Edinburgh, Glasgow Caledonian University, University of Strathclyde, Heriot-Watt University, Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health at the University of Aberdeen, Robert Gordon University, Abertay University, Queen Margaret University.

Highland Galvanizers was formed in 1978 to provide a galvanizing service across Scotland and has developed a reputation for quality and reliability of service.

In order to provide a better service, in 2002 a second plant was opened in Cumbernauld operating under the name of Highland Colour Coaters, thus introducing a quality means of having colour on galvanized steel. Developing this process extensively, the Company now offers its unique Colourgalv process to those who want both decorative and corrosion protective coatings on all manner of metalworks.

Challenge

This Colourgalv process runs into an occasional problem called pinholing where the galvanized steel appears to evolve some gas during the curing of the powder through the hardening powder-coating causing small craters or pinholes.

Solution

Interface identified expertise within six universities across Scotland and the company opted to work with Glasgow Caledonian University.

“We were delighted with the responses we received from the universities. Glasgow Caledonian was clearly able to demonstrate expertise in this area,” commented Geoff Crowley, Managing Director, Highland Colour Coaters

“We have reduced the rate of re-works from 4% to less than 1%, saving between £70,000 and £100,000 per annum to our business…For researching a problem that we don’t have the people, time or resources to do ourselves, this KTP was great for us”

Following discussions between the partners, a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) was identified as the most beneficial mechanism for managing the research for the company.

Benefits

Emtelle is the global leader in ducted network solutions and air blown fibre solutions. It produces small, lightweight and robust underground cabling systems, pioneering the next generation of broadband network solutions for FttH (Fibre-To-The-Home)

Recent communications contracts have included cabling the communications infrastructure to 7600 homes in Nuenen, in The Netherlands and for the Olympic Village in Athens in 2004.

The Business Challenge

A particular problem of underground cable management is the presence of water and moisture in the tubing which houses the fibre optic cables and Emtelle’s R&D team in Hawick has been looking to develop the next generation of polyethylene tubing with a greatly reduced water permeability rate. To do this, Emtelle required a recognised specialist working in the area of semi-permeable membrane technology.

“One of my colleagues had been sent a leaflet about Interface and the benefits for us were immediately apparent. We required a specific expertise and, based on our criteria, we contacted Interface who put us in touch with the School of Engineering at Glasgow Caledonian University,

Interface was the ideal catalyst in helping bring both parties together. Having previously worked with Heriot-Watt and Napier Universities on knowledge transfer partnership projects, we were aware that the external expertise we required probably existed within academia, but crucially, needed to find ways of uncovering the correct academic partner for this very distinct engineering project.” commented Phil Clayton, technical manager of Emtelle

The Solution

Interface identified that this area of expertise was available through The Glasgow Caledonian University’s School of Engineering and more specifically the Centre for Research on Indoor Climate and Health.

The centre’s Chris Sanders takes up the story.

“The contact that Interface made for us with Emtelle led to an interesting series of discussions and allowed us to develop a relationship with a new industry sector This enabled us to bring our expertise on moisture transport into a novel field.  Interface plays a very valuable role in establishing contacts between specialised University groups and industrial organisations working in areas outside their usual field.”

A short-term consultancy project was agreed, enabling Emtelle to begin developing a superior product with ultra low water permeation rates. In short, Interface gave Emtelle access to knowledge outside the core expertise of its business that helped it onto the next stage of our product development cycle.

Phil Clayton added, “I believe that Interface is the perfect ‘trouble-shooter’. I would urge more companies and businesses to look closely at Interface to help cement the bond between academic talent and companies looking to further their product development. It really is a great opportunity to have Interface at your disposal.

The relationship made between universities and organisations have an important role to play particularly where complex problems and issues have to be resolved.”

Click here for more information on Emtelle.

Whisky making is a long established industry normally associated with the distilleries spread around the Highlands of Scotland, but a local entrepreneur in Dumfries & Galloway has set his sights on breathing fresh life into a distillery which was last in use nearly 90 years ago.

David Thomson and his wife purchased the long-derelict Annandale Distillery based in Lowlands, near Dumfries, which first opened in the 1830’s and remained at the forefront of lowland whisky production until it closed in 1919. Now, almost 90 years later, a newly formed Annandale Distillery Company Limited is a step closer to restoring the historic distillery buildings to its former glory with its new whisky brand and an integral online visitor ‘experience’.

The Business Challenge

Financial assistance secured from Historic Scotland and The Scottish Government through a Regional Selective Assistance (RSA) grant initially helped to get the project off the ground, but of prime importance to David was academic help to undertake historical research pertaining to the locale of the distillery and the culture of its area. This would involve delving into areas such as the evolution and history of the lowland Scots language and emigration patterns from the region.

All this research was central to the brand ethos that he plans to develop and is also important in the context of developing a memorable online visitor experience.

Understanding David’s ‘day job’ was key to sourcing the level of high quality research he required. He is founder and CEO of MMR Research, one of Europe’s largest, independent consumer research businesses. Additionally, he is visiting Professor in the Department of Food Biosciences at University of Reading, UK, where key interests include sensory branding and the development of understanding consumers’ choice behavior.

The Solution

With his knowledge, David identified Interface – The knowledge connection for business, as an excellent source to tap into, partly because the team can access academics with key knowledge pertinent to his project and partly because in David’s own words ‘as well as the quality of whisky, it is important that the brand has some meaning and value’.

Interface rapidly understood and immediately grasped the key elements of David’s requirement and arranged collaboration with three academics specialising in quite distinct areas that would support his aims. The key was to convey much of the evolution and history of the lowland Scots language and written in a style which, in David’s words, had to be light and witty, but also comprehensive and credible, with the scope to offer further enhancement and development.

Interface put him in touch with renowned linguist, John Corbett, Professor of Applied Language Studies at the University of Glasgow with specialism in Scots language studies.  Professor Corbett wrote on the development of the Lowland Scots language and used the language to add descriptions of historical whisky and whisky-related events.

Interface also brokered collaboration with Dr Billy Kenefick, a lecturer in modern Scottish and British history at the University of Dundee, who looked at the history of the area and its migration patterns to other regions throughout the world. This is of particular importance to David, since the Single Malt Lowland Scotch whisky produced at the Annandale Distillery will be sold globally (either through the website or an international network of drinks distributors) and he has identified that a key target will be consumers around the world with Scots heritage and ancestry.

By populating the website with historical facts and figures around the history of emigrant Scots, these consumers could relate to their forefathers migration to the colonies such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA and South Africa. Indeed, the migration from the borders was of special significance, since David’s home town of Annan was a significant emigration port in the 1700s and 1800s, either offering direct sailings to the colonies or as a ‘feeder service’ to larger vessels bound from Liverpool.

The third academic Interface brokered a partnership for was through Dr Malcolm Lochead, a fellow in design, based at Glasgow Caledonian University who contributed to the initial ideas on brand design and development and is designing a signature plaid for the distillery.

“I am so grateful to Interface for bringing together this resource of extraordinary academic talent. Each project has its own challenges and the information and research has been pivotal to keeping the developmental phase on track.  I was intrigued to see if the academic teams were up to the demands of the task, and so far I have been very impressed. Trying to lay my hands on all this information myself, would have taken me a significant amount of time, but the Interface team pulled out all the stops to surpass my expectations.”