Martin Howarth (National Centre of Excellence for Food Engineering) has secured projects with a value of £1.2m from the ERDF (£619k) to support the build and equip the new facility and Innovate UK (£544k) to support the next generation of rice processing which is part of a £32.1m project involving UK and Chinese partners.

About the project

Achieving optimal efficiency in the post-harvest handling and processing of rice is a ubiquitous challenge for China’s agri-food sector. Rice is the staple food of two thirds of the population and it produces around 1.3bn of quality rice each year. This is insufficient to meet the aggressive population which is due to land pressure and inefficient milling process-handling resulting in an average 50% grain losses in machine batch processing. There are 6000 medium large mills across China operating at 50-60% efficiency rates. Conventional milling machines are manually operated and have no mechanism to respond to process variants (temperature, machine failures, contaminants) which can result in a whole milled batch being ruined.

Our project aims to develop a novel, digital milling process, supported by AI software platforms that will intuitively respond and adapt to potential process failures, reduce milled waste and inject an additional amount of high quality rice worth a further £1.2bn to regional farming communities. This will be supported by a new business model, and education programme to support technology uptake