About TFM

Industry Partnership & Collaboration

A consortium of industry and university partners have engaged in a series of workshops under the banner Transformational Food Manufacturing.

From the perspective of food as an advanced manufacturing industry, the overarching goal of these workshops is to lay the groundwork for a national public-private partnership that will revolutionize food processing and manufacturing in the US.

This will enhance food safety and security worldwide, increase American manufacturing competitiveness (not just in food, but in the supporting industries comprising the entire supply chain) and in so doing, grow the US manufacturing workforce into the 22nd century.

Workshop Objectives

Over the past four years, a group from industry, government, non-profits and academia convened to articulate and begin exploring the technology barriers facing the food and beverage industry.

Broad technology gap areas include:

Automation and Control
Advanced Materials
Sensors
Data and Analytics
Workforce
Regulation
Public Policy
Education

While important insights were gained from these discussions, there is a level of actionable detail that is still missing. As such, more focused dialogue, with support from National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), has begun to more significantly advance the understanding of the problem and what needs to be done to advance this critically important manufacturing sector. This phase of the conversation is built around three workshops, of which this was the first.

Specific objectives for these workshops are:

Broadening the existing consortium to better represent major segments of the food manufacturing supply chain,
Identifying industry-wide technology gaps and
Building the framework of a roadmap to address those gaps.