State agencies, business and academia have joined forces to research milk and, once its useful ingredients have been isolated, the hope is that these could be added to foods to support your health, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL

GOT MILK? There might be more to the white stuff you pour on your cereal than you think. The Food for Health Ireland consortium has been “mining” cow’s milk for several years, looking to isolate bioactive or functional ingredients that could help to control appetite and blood sugar levels and keep us healthy as we age.

“We are trying to understand the ingredients in milk – there are thousands of them: proteins, peptides, complex carbohydrates and lipids,” explains FHI’s chief executive Jens Bleiel. “You might think that researchers should know everything about milk, but we have identified 1,850 new compounds in it.”

Of those, about 50 were predicted to have possible health-enhancing properties, and the tally has been whittled down to a handful that are being trialled in the lab and in human studies. The hope is that the isolated ingredients could eventually be added to foods to support health-related areas including infant development, metabolic health and healthy muscle function in ageing.

Bleiel, who hails from the Bonn area in Germany, was recruited to the post of chief executive in 2009, a year after the FHI consortium had been set up.

The scale of the project he joined is worth considering: it includes researchers from University College Cork, University College Dublin, University of Limerick and Teagasc, Moorepark and four industry partners: Carbery Group, Dairygold Food Ingredients Ltd, Glanbia plc and Kerry Group plc.

Over the five-year project, FHI is getting €15 million in direct funding from Enterprise Ireland plus overhead contributions. It represents approximately 5 per cent of Enterprise Ireland’s total investment in higher-level research over this period, and in terms of single projects, FHI is the largest investment by Enterprise Ireland in an RD consortium to date. Add in company contributions and you get a total project value of more than €20 million.

So why did Bleiel, a business economist, take on the job?

“At that time the industry partners in FHI had made the suggestion to have someone from outside of Ireland and with a business background,” he explains when we meet in Dublin last week, just before he spoke at the National Dairy Council conference Unlocking Dairy Growth. “The question was: Would you need a scientist to lead a programme like FHI, or someone who is able to translate the science into something that is relevant for the market?”

With years of experience in the functional food industry and building up brands, Bleiel fit the bill. As he points out, there’s little point in developing functional food ingredients in the lab that no-one will ever consume.

“What I saw in my industry time was that there is very often a disconnect between the RD departments and the marketing and sales departments,” he says. “They talk completely different languages and that creates a lot of interruptions.”

And what turned Bleiel’s head about FHI was the set-up.

“I had never seen this before, where you have four companies that are very complementary in their strengths and four top in food all coming together to develop new functional ingredients,” he recalls. “That to me sounded like the very best model to make something really happen in the food innovation arena.”

However, he did make a change when he looked at the areas being targeted.

“Colorectal cancer was one element in the programme originally, and I questioned whether we as a food programme should really target disease,” he says. “Even if we found something that might help or provide a support, the four industry partners are food companies, how would they ever access the pharmaceutical market? So we opened the area of healthy ageing, which makes more sense.”

Bleiel describes the task of combining industry and academic groups as “a lot of day-to-day work and bringing people together and talking” but points out that working in a pre-competitive space makes it possible.

“When I arrived, the companies had a very clear understanding what they wanted to get out of FHI, that this is pre-competitive research,” he says. “So if we develop a new peptide pre-competitively, for example, all four companies could then conceivably bring it into their respective market-market combinations. One might put it into a drink in Europe, another might put it into a supplement in the US. This is how they then compete in the world market.”

Another factor is that the companies are putting substantial funding into the consortium, he adds. “For me it is an absolute success criterion that food companies are paying cash into the organisation. They want to see a return.”

Meanwhile, for academic partners, the benefits include funding for research and an environment where researchers can get industry exposure and can collaborate on projects across several fields.

The aim is not only to find the proposed functional ingredients, but also to get solid data to back them up. This is important for commercialisation because in recent years the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has been tightening regulations on health claims.

“A lot of companies are moaning about EFSA,” says Bleiel. “But industry needs to get their act together to produce good science.”

And while the functional food area can be crowded with plenty of competition, he argues that Ireland needs to innovate in this area to have an edge in a global dairy market that is becoming more concentrated.

“For me it’s all about value addition to milk, and in order to be able to do that you need to understand what you can do with dairy ingredients,” he says.

“We need to bring the pre-competitive research effort to a higher level; you talk to the big food companies and they want to have ingredients from suppliers who understand the science.” IP from the research is now being considered for patenting, but Bleiel says that would not be the complete metric of the project’s progress.

“The value of FHI may be not so much in the patents but much more in the knowledge and the science, results and reports that we make available to the companies,” he says. “I think the biggest outcome of FHI for the companies is not the ingredients we hope to have next year, it’s all the technologies, insights and formulation projects we have done. The interest is also to extend that to other sources like plants or marine – the milk research we have done has given us a lot of structures and methodologies and how to set up such a research programme. The big food companies don’t mind whether the ingredient comes from milk, marine or plants as long as it’s natural, safe, functional, cheap and it tastes good.”