Where the innovation is

I spent part of this week at the Canadean Dairy Innovation Summit in Dublin, Ireland. I think the only big complaint I have is that they asked me to chair the second day, and to say I suffer from public speaking nerves is an understatement. I can only apologise to the speakers whose names I mangled, and to the audience as a whole. That being said, it was a useful exercise. Is dairy being innovative enough? Sometimes these conferences throw up more questions than they answer, and this definitely did.

Ireland is being heralded as one of the future winners of the global dairy market, with regard to production. Indeed, the more you look at the claim of a 50 per cent increase in milk output in the coming years, the more it seems possible. All the environmental conditions are right for it. However, as one participant noted, what are they doing with this extra output? It’s going into the usual items – liquid milk, cream, butter, cheese and powder. Not exactly revolutionary. That being said, these can be the building blocks for new products and high-quality raw materials will be necessary to drive further growth in innovative products.

But what will these products be? Where’s the smart water of dairy? Who is combining what we are beginning to unlock in dairy components, and turning it into a viable commercial product? Are we just turning over old products – Greek yogurt, for example – and selling them differently? It’s a question that we all have to answer in order to remain viable in a volatile world, and I suspect it will be smaller companies emerging with some of the keys to unlocking this.