Jumpstarting the future of food production

There’s a famous saying about how laws and sausages are two things the average person should never see being made. But building a better sausage is the goal of a new program recently launched from the Accelerator Centre in the David Johnston Research + Technology Park.

Canada’s Technology For Food (CTFF) is an initiative designed to attract tech talent to the area of food-processing production. It is being spearheaded by the City of Waterloo through the Waterloo Economic Development Committee (WEDC) and its vice-chair, Ted McKechnie, with the Accelerator Centre as a key founding partner.

"We are extremely excited to play a leadership role in this important partnership," says Tim Ellis, CEO of the Accelerator Centre. "Every day within our facility we are inspired by the creative thinking of entrepreneurs and start-ups who apply out of the box thinking, fearlessness and creativity to solve economic and business challenges. Canada's Technology for Food brings an industry with significant economic impact in Ontario and a new sphere of opportunities into the mix.

The University of Waterloo is one of the founding academic partners of the initiative, working alongside the University of Guelph, Conestoga College, Wilfrid Laurier University and Niagara College with industry partners Piller’s Fine Foods, Brick Brewery, Conestoga Meat Packers, KL Products and Cambridge Metal Products.

The program will bring academic and industry partners together with Waterloo’s business community to foster innovation and accelerate the commercialization of new technologies and techniques that will advance Canada’s food and beverage processing industry.

Food and beverage production may not exactly be the first stop on one’s train of thought where startups are concerned, what with all the attention being paid to wearable computers, cloud-based mobile apps, and gameified collaborative web tools, but it is an example of an attractive area of potential growth – advanced manufacturing – where Canada is currently lagging.

Encouraging the application of computer and mechanical engineering talent and tools to food production, which is heavy on automation, robotics and fabrication, will help Canadian food producers get ahead of the curve. CTFF will focus on innovating, retraining, and building a highly skilled workforce to bridge this gap.

“I'm really looking forward to fostering some new innovative companies who I know will bring exciting new answers to the challenges facing our food and beverage processing industry today,” Ellis says.

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Waterloo among Top 50 globally for engineering, tech

With files from the Media Relations office

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has named the University of Waterloo among the top 50 universities in the world for academic achievement in engineering/technology and computer science for the second year running.

Waterloo ranked at 43 in the world for Engineering and amongst the top 200 universities overall globally. The results mark the fourth year running that the group has named Waterloo in the top 200 worldwide and places it seventh out of 23 Canadian institutions.

"The University of Waterloo is proud of the excellence in research and academic programming that places us among the top universities in the world," said Feridun Hamdullahpur, president & vice-chancellor of Waterloo.  "These results demonstrate our core strength in research which, together with our unique experiential and entrepreneurial approaches to education, make us one of the world's top innovation universities."

The ARWU ranking is widely recognized as being heavily focused on the so-called STEM areas of science, technology, engineering and math, and for placing comparatively less focus on teaching metrics and research measurement in disciplines such as the arts and humanities.

Read the full release from the Media Relations office.

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Campus enters the dog days of summer

Campus gets as quiet as it gets after the exams are handed in and the students shuffle off.

Food Services are paring back for the intersessional period, so check in with this convenient listing of hours of operation on a location-by-location basis.

Athletics is getting in on the slow-down, too, and so are those hallowed halls of higher learning, the Library.

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