Consus Fresh Solutions Ltd to Use £47,500 Grant to Help Reduce Food Waste

Consus Fresh Solutions Ltd to Use £47,500 Grant to Help Reduce Food Waste

With food wastage one of today’s hottest issues, Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority is backing a local company at the cutting edge of the battle to reduce spoilage of perishable food.

The Bourne-based company Consus Fresh Solutions Ltd has been awarded a grant of £47,500 from the Combined Authority’s Eastern Agri-Tech Growth Initiative.

The Eastern Agri-Tech Growth Initiative is designed to support the development of new and innovate ideas within the Agri-Tech sector, the initiative has two main funds that can help support local businesses.

The Agri-Tech Growth Fund offers grant funding to support product development and improve agricultural productivity and the Research, Development and Prototyping Fund which helps to support the research and development of new products or processes.

The grant awarded to Consus is a contribution towards an innovative project to help revolutionise food labelling and so reduce unnecessary waste.

The project, costing £101,000 overall, will develop two applications for assisting growers to run their production operations more efficiently and help them win or keep the lucrative supermarket business. The main driver is to reduce food wastage, by concentrating on two areas:

• the recording of harvest data and
• the product pack label integrity.

These highly-flexible applications will be offered both as a standalone product to growers and packers, and also for integration with the Consus Packhouse System, a scheme that gives growers a fully integrated solution to digitalise all aspects of their packing operations and to move away from the old hand written methods.

Consus Fresh Solutions was co-founded by Derek Thompson and Peter Taylor in 2016, Mr Thompson said:

“Our thanks go out to the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority whose kind sponsorship has significantly helped with the development of these two novel solutions.

“We are particularly excited about the Label Verification Solution which is not only about saving growers and packers money in reducing labour costs in packhouse label rooms, but more importantly this application will ensure that you have the correct label on the correct product and that all the text matches the customers specification.

“Reduced label wastage costs and knowing that your product will not be rejected by your customer for incorrect labelling will be welcomed by growers and packers.

“Although designed for Fresh Produce, the Label Verification will work across multiple industries.”