It has been a few weeks since we attended the Shrewsbury Food Festival and I think my feet have just about recovered. We were asked to demonstrate the field to fork principle with regard to food production and had a prime spot right by the entrance.
We designed a bale trail that illustrated the production of pizzas with stations along the trail showing the constitute ingredients and the technologies used to produce the pizzas available from the supermarket. Grinding of wheat grains for the dough, automated milking of cows for cheese production, phototonics (sensing with light) for tomato grading, hydroponic growing of herbs and addition of preservatives to increase shelf life to name just a few processes demonstrated. The robot arm demonstrating placing olives on the base proved to be a great crowd pleaser and there was a constant queue for the VR headsets, that demonstrated how the different types of engineering have a role within the Agriculture industry.
Finding the hidden tomatoes along the trail was a big hit with the younger children and those that found all of them were rewarded with a squishy tomato stress ball. Milking Daisy the cow was also very popular with children and adults alike – one man claimed it had ticked off an item from his bucket list. I also grew very fond of Daisy over the weekend as the photo shows!
It was a fabulous weekend – the sun shone, the street food I tried was delicious but best of all I met small business owners that I’d worked with but not been able to meet face to face due to the pandemic, actually seeing the success of their businesses, which the AGRI Project had supported with was a real highlight.
Tanya Postles – Food Innovation Specialist – AGRI