Collaborate with our partners to bridge technology gaps

IPI is working with our Open Innovation partner from UK to seek crushable capsules for encapsulation of a wide spectrum of hydrophobic and hydrophilic flavours.The client is an established manufacturer of FMCG (fast moving consumer good) products incorporating a range of flavourings (e.g. fruit, herb, botanical or synthetic versions). Flavours can enhance the consumer enjoyment of products and manufacturers are increasingly looking for versatile technology platforms to incorporate a variety of such ingredients into their product ranges. Food, health or consumer products often require the encapsulation of flavours or active ingredients to improve the stability or control the release for a specific trigger (including consumer activation). One way these are delivered is via soft or hard capsules, and common applications include, cosmetics, confectionary, chewing gum, detergents, nutraceuticals, etc.The client is thus seeking collaborators for crushable capsules that can encapsulate a wide spectrum of hydrophobic and hydrophilic flavours in either a single-phase solvent, in an emulsion or suspension. The client would prefer a solution in development that has the capability to be manufactured at production scale in the near future. As they may require customisation of a solution, collaborators with testing and development facilities to enable product optimisation would be of higher interest to the client.

Consumers are already familiar with the use of active compounds such as caffeine in beverages, but there is now an increasing number of food, beverage and confectionary formats used to deliver a variety of active ingredients / extracts for the consumer lifestyle and consumer wellbeing markets. However, the dosage and subsequent delivery formats are not always formulated or optimised with scientific evidence to underpin them, and so risk compromising the product’s efficacy and safety.The seeker is an established FMCG company developing a range of nutraceutical products containing functional ingredients used to provide a desired product effect (e.g. cognitive or to mood). They have extensive research and development capabilities, with robust laboratory and quality control processes ensuring it can develop and commercialise an ongoing pipeline of products for its customer base. The company wants to ensure their formulations are developed with full understanding of the efficacy of active ingredients and their interaction with each other, to allow the consumer to make an informed decision in their choice of product. Thus, they are seeking experienced scientific partners to support their product development teams, and this provides an excellent business opportunity for an ongoing partnership with an established manufacturer. 

Smart packaging has emerged as a potential solution to consumers to track the usage of a product. By collecting the data (e.g., volume, temperature, weight) from the sensor and wirelessly transmitting the measured data to a processing unit (e.g., mobile phone), the usage and quality of a product can be analyzed. The analyzed data can provide several information to the users, such as when to replenish the product, the effectiveness of a medicine and when the product is used.The Singapore company aspires to be the market leader in Smart packaging offering an integrated intelligent connected packaging label solution for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), Food and Healthcare products. Currently, fakes products are prevalent in both online and offline space. The ability to authenticate products are crucial for both consumers’ welfare and companies’ revenue. This is especially so for food related products.The company is currently providing solutions to help companies in S.E Asia and China on Brand Protection and Product authentication to prevent loss revenue due to counterfeit, track supply chain and engage consumers.The company believes in 2 broad future trends – (1) Product Authenticity and (2) Internet of Things (IoT). They are interested in technology that can be incorporated as intelligent packaging where a smart label on product packaging is engage consumers and help to track product consumption by the user.The company is seeking a wireless electronic tag that can be easily integrated or attached on a packaging and able to capture the usage and frequency of the consumption of products, such as milk powder, drink, medicine. Use case for intelligent packaging label:A smart label is applied onto a healthcare supplement product. The label outside the packaging will automatically track how much supplement is left on the bottle and provide alerts to the consumer’s smartphone. It can be integrated to seller’s stores for delivery with a button. The sellers can also receive notification on real time consumption levels in different locations and help to ensure sufficient supplies for replenishment to their customers.The company is on the lookout for suitable partners to create, develop or integrate intelligent technology with brand protection technology solutions to allow consumers to first authenticate product purchase and then monitor product consumption level.

We are working with a food manufacturing business and brand owner whose products include cured, chilled meat. Curing is a traditional preservation process used to impart colour, flavour and texture to some meats, in addition to food safety control against pathogens. The curing process combines several elements (e.g. use of a brine, hanging, tumbling/manipulating, forming and cooking) over a number of days/weeks/months, to produce a variety of tastes and textures in the end products, e.g. a traditional cured, sliced ham. This process also requires the addition of nitrates/nitrites (in the form of the brine), which are injected into the raw meat and/or used to immerse it, before further processing.There is research suggesting that the use of nitrates/nitrites can cause potential health issues, through the formation of potentially carcinogenic nitrosamines. It is for this reason that food processors and retailers are exploring alternative ingredients, e.g. vegetable powders containing natural sources of nitrates, to reduce the impact on the human body. However, replicating the physical appearance, as well as texture and flavour of premium quality meat has been problematic when using alternative ingredients and the chilled environments required for food processing.The client is therefore actively searching for a step-change in potential solutions to replicate the meat curing process (and subsequent physical appearance/flavour) without the use of added nitrates/nitrites. The compounds to be replaced provide several functions, and so any alternative solutions should have quality parity to current premium ham products in the market place and enable one or more of the following:-▪ Retention of fibrous texture of cooked meat▪ Characteristic pinkish colour and cured flavour▪ Food safety/shelf-life stability / production of toxic compoundsSolutions which can only provide some of the functionalities above would be interesting if a combination with other methods could lead to a replacement / reduction in the use of nitrites in the process.

The National Environment Agency (NEA) and Enterprise Singapore (ESG) have jointly launched the Call for Data-driven Environmental Services (ES) Operations as part of the National Innovation Challenges (NIC). This Innovation Challenge is launched together with four problem owners (i.e. CapitaLand Limited, Keppel Land Limited, Mapletree Investments Pte Ltd and NTUC Club) who are partners under NEA’s ES Industry Transformation Map (ITM) INCUBATE partnership programme.

The Singapore Israel Industrial R&D Foundation (SIIRD) is a co-operation between Enterprise Singapore (ESG) and Israel Innovation Authority to promote, facilitate and support joint industrial R&D collaboration between Singapore-based companies and Israel-based companies across different industries. SIIRD seeks to promote R&D between Singapore and Israel by providing up to US$1M in funding for joint R&D projects between them. You may find out more about the types of project grants available here. Companies from Singapore and Israel are invited to submit joint R&D project proposals from any sector area. The call is active from 1 Dec 2020 till 25 Feb 2021.

The client provides renewable energy sources to areas with limited access to electricity. They are interested to develop a new energy storage device to complement their business offerings. They have acquired a lithium-ion supercapacitor technology and is seeking for technology partners to jointly develop a scalable prototype and optimize the supercapacitor’s performance.

A Singapore company that provides soldering and bonding solutions to electronics companies is seeking technologies and/or technology partners with the relevant expertise to co-develop epoxy solder pastes. With growing demand for flexible printed circuits and rigid-flex circuits, the market is seeing new generations of materials being used. A shift in how soldering and bonding will be done is also necessary in order to meet the respective product requirements.To meet these new requirements, the company is looking to develop new epoxy solder paste formulations as an alternative bonding material. This new bonding material can be applied to soldering components, including flexible circuits, display panels and other electronics component manufacturing.

A Singapore based agriculture biomaterial processing company is seeking chemical free technologies to manufacture pineapple leaf fibers (PALF) from pineapple leaves. Pineapple is a popular plant mainly cultivate for its delicious fruit. As it is a perennial crop, the plant is of no use post fruit harvesting, resulting in huge volumes of pineapple leaves generated as agricultural waste. In the Philippines, traditional luxury textiles made by traditional craftsmen in small quantities were made of PALF and exported to Europe in the past. The modern PALF manufacturing process consumes substantial amounts of generates large amounts of difficult-to-treat wastewater. As such, chemical-free methods that that minimise or eliminates the usage of chemicals as well as the generation of wastewater are desired to minimise the impact on the environment.