The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has recently invited a UK academic consortium to submit a full application for funding to establish a cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional research hub.
The hub will be led by Cranfield University, together with academic partners the University of Surrey, University of Leeds, and University of Nottingham. It will aim to transform consumer products manufacturing (in particular food, drink and personal care sectors) by integrating producers and consumers in co-creating products that are so personalised, consumers regard them as an extension of their health and well-being.
The hub will develop new manufacturing processes to enable producers to make the personalised products in a responsive and economical manner.
We are now looking for industrial companies to form an end user steering group and guide the development of industry applications.
The hub’s strategy is to see 'consumers in the loop', as product co-creators, feeding back to brands their needs through multiple 'always-on' data streams which, in turn, they cluster and leverage to rapidly re-align manufacturing for profitably making these personalised products.
Sensory attributes of a product will remain the key driver for consumer product innovation; the sector understands that obesity and other metabolic disorders arising from food consumption have now reached epidemic levels. Hub partners recognise the significant role they can play in the future from producing generic products that just appeal to taste or provide comfort to providing personalised functional products that prevent diseases and promote and maintain wellbeing.
Activities and anticipated outcomes
The underpinning science and technology for scaling-up the manufacture of functional products, tailored to consumer health profiles, will be developed by:
- Establishing personalisation needs/wants, including activities of understanding and determining consumer profile clusters through novel low-cost techniques, at large scale, that enable the redefining the role of the consumers by instigating and leveraging consumer-generated data;
- Developing novel techniques which engage consumers in a co-creation process, enabling the comprehensive digital capture of their priorities and needs in order to drive product formulation and manufacture at the right scale, in a timely and economical fashion;
- Creating smart techniques and AI which provide the capacity for modelling consumer preferences at scale, while maintaining the human stakeholders in the loop through generating interpretable and scrutable insights;
- Enabling the departure from traditional mass production practices of generic products for the idealised consumer, to producing valued personalised products;
- Addressing the fundamental challenge of enabling agile manufacturing systems, being responsive to consumer cluster needs, by upgrading production processes through intensification using continuous manufacturing and unit operation telescoping (the whole process optimisation will be used for those processes that cannot be upgraded);
- Working with our end user network to industrialise these developments by taking them rapidly through to deployment.
Get involved
- Join a world-leading, multi-disciplinary team that is redefining the role of the consumers as product co-creators.
- Guide the research team to develop applications and focus on high priority areas of improvement.
- Join the project and be the first to experience and test new responsive and agile manufacturing techniques.
- Contribute facilities and resources (in kind or financial) to guide the project team as part of an end user network.
