Public Funding for Pladis (UK) Limited

This project will allow the production of low fat and low sugar healthy biscuits. There is a partnership between a biscuit manufacturer, an ingredient manufacturer and a University in order to achieve this. Therefore the skills and expertise of the partners will allow for the manufacture of high quality products that behave as current products. Different scientific knowledge will be developed and published.

Users of soft wheat have identified variation in quality to be a major root cause of challenges encountered in downstream processing. These challenges are currently managed reactively, and are exacerbated by a fundamental lack of understanding in terms of defining the principal quality characteristics of soft wheat for a given process. This project will address this challenge by identifying desirable quality characteristics, developing analytical tests to allow screening of soft wheat lines, and finally testing the stability of these characteristics in the context of variation according to growing environment and year. This will enable a new pipeline of quality soft wheat varieties in the UK, less reliance on wheat imports, and a reduction in downtime and use of processing aids in downstream manufacturing.

This collaborative project proposes to exploit the value in Used Cooking Oil (UCO) by creating a renewable fuel solution for use in return-to-base 44 tonne articulated vehicles in a way that is innovative and provides greater Green House Gas savings than any other liquid fuel. United Biscuits has joined forces with Biomotive Fuels and University of Leeds, supported by a number of partner companies (bioltec, Fuchs Lubricants UK plc, The AA, Convert2Green Ltd) to demonstrate benefits that cannot be achieved with conventional UCO biodiesel. The Research and Development work to be undertaken by the academic partner will provide essential technical and operational information and tools which will not only inform the partnership how best to implement and optimise the solution with modern diesel transport engines, but also underpin the carbon savings and reinforce the whole viability of the UCO renewable fuel.