Catriona Liddle is Head of the Scottish Centre for Food Development and Innovation at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh. Before this Catriona spent over 20 years as a product developer in the food industry.
In this episode Catriona shares the journey to developing palm oil substitute Palm-Alt and what she has learned about collaborations between academia and industry including:
Find out more about Catriona’s work
Follow the Academic Adventures podcast on LinkedIn
This podcast was a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky. The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black and Sarah McLusky. Proudly supported by the Scottish Ecosystem Fund 2023-24.
Catriona Liddle is Head of the Scottish Centre for Food Development and Innovation at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh. Before this Catriona spent over 20 years as a product developer in the food industry.
In this episode Catriona shares the journey to developing palm oil substitute Palm-Alt and what she has learned about collaborations between academia and industry including:
Find out more about Catriona’s work
Follow the Academic Adventures podcast on LinkedIn
This podcast was a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky. The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black and Sarah McLusky. Proudly supported by the Scottish Ecosystem Fund 2023-24.
Catriona Liddle
Not every academic wants to start their own company. They just want to be able to show that something is possible and it can be commercialised, whether that's them or not
I still get a buzz out of seeing one of the projects we’ve worked on in the supermarket.
Hopefully you get there in the end. But even if you don't, you learn something. What's that line? You either win or you learn.
I think fundamentally it's about support because it can feel a bit lonely otherwise.
Podcast Intro
Welcome to the Academic Adventures podcast. This podcast is all about people who have embraced the opportunity to combine their academic work with entrepreneurial ventures. You’ll hear about the highs and lows, balancing responsibilities and grabbing opportunities, plus advice for anyone thinking about following a similar path.
Sarah McLusky
Hello there. I’m your host Sarah McLusky and my Academic Adventurer for this episode is Catriona Liddle. Catriona is Head of the Scottish Centre for Food Development and Innovation at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh. Catriona joined the university in 2015 after a 20-year career in the food industry including time at well-known brands like Campbells Soup and Diet Chef.
Catriona specialises in product development and reformulation. Her interest in health and sustainability led her and colleague Julien Longchamps to develop Palm-Alt. This palm oil replacement hit the headlines last year and could go into production soon, but, as you’ll hear, the development process was not without its challenges, especially with COVID in the mix. A self-confessed ‘nerdy academic’ Catriona does get a kick out of seeing products she’s worked on out in the real world, but is happy to leave the nuts and bolts of commercialisation to someone else.
Sarah McLusky
Welcome along to the podcast, Catriona. Thanks so much for coming to have a chat. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about what it is that you do and your experience of entrepreneurship within academia.
Catriona Liddle
Okay, then I run the Scottish Centre for Food Development Innovation, which is quite a long title, at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, and we are a food and drink service to the food industry. So we are a knowledge exchange unit in round terms, and we do quite a bit of research also.
So we work with lots of companies who want to start their own food and drink businesses or establish businesses that want to do product development and consumer testing and those kind of things. So I suppose we're a little unusual in that we're a semi-commercial unit within a university. So we do some consultancy and some funded projects for industry.
Sarah McLusky
Yeah, so I think as one of the things we want to dig into today is some of those projects you've been involved in with industry and actually your background in industry, isn't it, rather than in academia.
Catriona Liddle
Yeah, I mean, I joined Queen Margaret in 2015 after quite a long career in the food industry, or 25 years or something. So yeah, so my background has been in entrepreneurial companies, and then coming to Queen Margaret. It’s a relatively small team we have here, but we're very specialist. So we can do lots of different things from across the food sector. So if you're a food and drink business that would like some help, then we like to hope that we can help most applicants for that.
Sarah McLusky
Yeah, excellent. I wonder if you could tell us then in your position where you are now at QMU about one or two of the projects that you're involved with.
Catriona Liddle
So the project that I'd like to talk about today is our PALM-ALT project, which is a replacer for palm shortening in the bakery industry. So if you know anything about palm oil, it's not got the biggest reputation for sustainability. It's very highly saturated fat, but it's used everywhere in the food industry, especially bakeries. It's quite high usage in bakery. So because it's very functional and very cheap.
So what we looked at is we did a bit of research ourselves without any particular funding myself and my co-creator Dr. Julien Longchamps who's also at Queen Margaret did a bit of work by ourselves looking at initially and found some quite useful information. So we then started applying for fundings, a little bit of internal funding and then was lucky enough to achieve some decent sized funding from Innovate UK.
So we got just a bit less than £700,000 in two stages to look at that, which is a reasonable amount of money for a small university like Queen Margaret. Because by that point, we had some very encouraging results and the whole point of that project was to look at commercialization and upscaling and that kind of stuff.
So we did that and it was successful. We finished the project. It was quite challenging during COVID. So because we're a food and drink project, it required trialling within a food and drink setting, a manufacturer, and COVID restrictions meant that we couldn't attend the trials, we couldn't see the trials, so it was a bit of a challenge.
And I think also it was probably a good example of ensuring that your industrial partners are really on board. So we've had other projects where that's absolutely been the case. We're currently working on a great project, everyone was really engaged and really committed. But sometimes, I don't know if it's a COVID thing, but sometimes we found it really challenging dealing with the companies who I think didn't really understand the concept of research. I think they were more used to dealing with suppliers who had products for them to test, whereas we were a research project looking for them to do a lot of the testing themselves and that was sometimes a bit challenging.
We got to the end of it, but it just probably was a bit more complex than it needed to be.
Sarah McLusky
Certainly, I imagine just that timing overall was not going to be the easiest. But you're in a situation though now where you've got this proof of concept. So what happens next and what do you think are the challenges that are facing you in the next stage of the journey?
Catriona Liddle
So we had proof of concept and then the obviously the Innovate UK project showed that it was commercially possible to manufacture it. So that's what we've done. We've done that at a pilot scale. Now we're part of the Scottish Enterprise High-Growth Spinout Programme. So between now and about October, we're looking at viability of creating it. So we've got lots of partners involved in doing market research, in doing pricing research, in doing discussions with manufacturers about making the product, that kind of stuff.
So come October we'll know if a company is going to be created with it or what that actually means. I mean my co-creator and I are not really interested in manufacturing fat for a living so we're looking at partners to do that. So it'll most likely be more of an exit strategy for us than...because we're already on our second, third, fourth project after this. So because it's been, we get, we're just the nerdy academics. You know, we find an idea, we, the commercialisation is probably for somebody else, I think.
Sarah McLusky
Yeah. So what's your role in the team at the moment?
Catriona Liddle
So I head up the centre, there's myself and three food technologists. So from a point of view of support I'm really lucky and a lot of academics wouldn't have three food technologists to help them. But obviously they're doing other commercial and other projects as well. So I would like to think I'm quite hands-on. I love being in the kitchen and the lab which is probably again quite unusual for somebody in my position but I very much get a kick out of being in the kitchen. And so there's that. And we also have other academics that we deal with both within QMU and in the wider academic landscape as well.
Sarah McLusky
And so that's within your team at QMU, but I was thinking about your team within this Pam-Alt project and this potential spin out. So are you working with, are you kind of project managing it or are there other people who are helping to do that side of things?
Catriona Liddle
Yeah, we've been really lucky in that we've got our commercial services team are also involved in helping us run this project to do a lot of the coordination because admin is not my skill, I've got to tell you. I'm terrible. I'm the most disorganised person. So it's really good that we've got QMU have committed to help us to do that.
So we have and we've also brought in what we've called a commercial champion for this project. He is going around having discussions with companies and looking at the commerciality of it so that we can get on with doing our day job. We're obviously still involved in the project quite heavily, but we're not having to do lots and lots of discussions with companies and stuff like that as well. We are providing the technical backup and other people are doing the commercial bit, which is perfect for us.
Sarah McLusky
Yeah, so you've got people who are there to help you. Are there any other kind of resources or practical things that you've found have helped you to navigate this world of academic industry collaborations?
Catriona Liddle
I mean, I think what's really helped is, again, I just want to mention that QMU are quite small. We didn't have a really a commercial team really as such with regards to patents, which we had to get a lot of help on. So we had to get a lot of external help for that because nobody to hear really done patents before. And it's a real minefield. The patent process is just extraordinary. The kind of hoops you've got to jump through.
So we have had help, but we've also got help from an organisation called NM Innovations, who are doing our patent work as well, and a lot of our commercialisation help as well. So that's been really helpful because we could never have done that ourselves. We just don't have the resources to do it. I mean there are other organisations like my department, but they are a lot bigger and a lot more established.
We've been around since 2014 and we are still quite a small team. But having said that, we think we punch above our weight quite a bit in terms of impact with the food industry. So, and we're providing things that other organisations like us don't provide, like real hands-on product development help and stuff like that.
So if an entrepreneur comes to us, we quite often get people coming to us and have an idea, but it might not be legal, or it might not be feasible, or it might not be, so we're there to kind of help them with that process or they have an idea and say, Catriona I'd love to do this, but I've no idea where to start. So there's those kind of things. So that's helping people for the last eight years on that is been quite a good springboard for us to look at our own stuff really, just to make sure that everything's up to date.
I mean, I think one of the criticisms we've had about other academics who our clients have dealt with is that they'll do things in theory, but actually they've not looked at whether it's legal or whether it's actually scalable, that kind of stuff. We do all of that. So we've already had that background in doing that before we looked at our own project. So that's been quite a good help from that point of view.
Sarah McLusky
And are there any other things? I mean, you've said that you've already moved on now, you know, since this PALM-ALT project started, you've moved on and done other things in the interim. Is there any learning that you think is starting, you're starting to see the way that the learning rolls from one project to another, any particular things that are useful?
Catriona Liddle
I think probably, and again I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself, but QMU are very small. I mean we're a very small university. We don't have necessarily the level of resource that other universities have. So as we've grown in status, I guess, for the department, it's helped to get the people help that we've had that we didn't have before potentially some equipment and that kind of stuff that we wouldn't have had.
So it's helped us being able to do other projects easier, better, quicker, because we've had a bit more investment in that as well. So there is that. But I think it's more about the wider understanding of what our team does within the university, because I think we are a bit of an oddball at Queen Margaret in that we're not within an academic department, we're not really a commercial department, we're kind of somewhere in the middle.
And I think sometimes it's difficult for either other departments in the university or the senior management team to kind of know where to put us because we are, we're a little unusual. But I mean, certainly we have quite an impact on the projects that we do. So hopefully that comes through when we're talking about to either external people. So we get a lot of people from the Scottish Government coming to chat to us about how to do stuff.
We're probably not as good at looking at policy stuff but maybe that's something we'll look at in the future as part of this palm-alt project because it takes a lot of boxes for sustainability because it's about 70% less carbon emissions than palm shortening so that's a big tick box but actually it's a lot healthier so if you're putting it into product that is a relatively unhealthy product already which is bakery you're looking at taking the calories and the fats down by around 30%, but the saturated fat down by 88%.
So if you can put that into general products, then you can understand that might have an impact on general population of people and put this into the products, especially for things like children's products. It's a very clean label product. There's nothing you don't understand on a label. So it's it ticks a lot of boxes because allergen free all that kind of stuff. So but using very clean label ingredients.
Sarah McLusky
Mm, so it's potentially...
Catriona Liddle
So we're hoping that from a policy point of view, we can be encouraging the Scottish government to look at limiting saturated fat consumption and things like that.
Sarah McLusky
Sounds potentially a really valuable product. I think that you're saying that you're already in a position where people like Scottish Government, other academics, people within the university, industry are coming to you, looking to you for advice. So what sorts of advice do you give to people who are thinking about following this kind of path?
Catriona Liddle
Yeah. We're really lucky. We've just completed our third year of a project called Thrive, which is run in conjunction with SRUC, Scotland's Rural College. And that is a program events, it's online events and in-person events, which is designed for the very young entrepreneur in food and drink. So, so we do things like we teach them about legislation, about nutrition, about branding, about product development, about how to set up co-packers, how to manufacture yourself. So it's a very good programme. It's currently free. So it's open to recent graduates, it's open to small companies, it's open to companies that have been around probably less than five years. But actually I think moving forward to next year we might expand it again. Each year we kind of expand it a bit. This will be our fourth year this coming year and each year we add a bit extra on.
So a lot of companies come to us for packaging so we're probably going to be looking at that in a bit more detail this year and we kind of expand it a bit more. We've done lots more webinars last year, we'll probably expand those as well but again it's still in its early stages of renewing it for next year.
We get very good feedback from it because one it's a free resource and secondly, it's real world, it's not just telling people theoretical stuff it's basically saying you can get business advice elsewhere, we'll include that as part of the programme, but if you want hands-on development, how to develop your product and the kind of pitfalls and benefits and all that kind of stuff, this is where you find it. We talk about how to find funding and investment as well, so it's kind of like a catch-all. I mean the food industry can be quite daunting and it's a very full-on kind of career and sometimes it just feels odd, I don't know where to start, you know or people have a great idea, they get so far down and then realise that someone like me comes along and says, yeah, excuse me, that's actually not legal what you're doing. And that's so it's always better to know that. And we get lots of comments that we didn't know what we didn't know. It's great. And we give all information packs out so they can go and refer to it later as well, so that they can remember, oh, yeah, Catriona talked about this or Kerry talked about this. And, you know, it kind of gives us gives a background that they can go back and look at a later date. So it's been pretty good.
Sarah McLusky
And is there, and it sounds like from what you're saying there, that the thing that you really notice that students and people who've come from an academic position are lacking, is that kind of real world, world knowledge, how to take something from an idea into…
Catriona Liddle
Yeah, we've actually had academics joining as well, so that I've been doing that. So that's been quite useful. We had we had two academics, I believe, joining us last year, and that's the first time we've had other academics joining. We're expecting more to join this year. So it's like I said, applications will open around April or May this year, and it runs in the autumn this year. So if you look out for the Thrive programme, anybody who's interested in doing that can contact us at Queen Margaret and we will we can advise when it opens.
Sarah McLusky
Excellent, we'll get some details about that and we can put them in the show notes as well. Yeah, so I mean you've talked some of the things you've talked there about it seems like although you've had little, you know there's been challenges of partnerships and things like that along the way fundamentally you've kind of got them where they ultimately, where you've kind of wanted them to be. Are there any things that you're happy to talk about which really didn't go how you expected at all?
Catriona Liddle
Okay, so I think because we, it's things that we've never done before, so it was a learning curve for a lot of stuff. So things like looking at patents, that was a torturous process. Wouldn't recommend that for anyone. But also, the wider Queen Margaret team understanding what we did and getting resource to help with that is always challenging in a small university because there's not necessarily an endless pot of money to be able to resource things on the off chance that you might create something good. But yeah, so there was that kind of situation as well and obviously where my own department has its own priorities so sometimes a lot of the work done on say the PALM-ALT project was done in my own time. As we mentioned it's a workaholic culture and if you've really got something you're really passionate about, which we worry about this, it does tend to involve a work-life balance that's maybe not ideal at times. Funding streams have very short deadlines. I could tell you all sorts of stories about how many sleepless nights we all had about writing funding proposals.
But yeah, I think fundamentally it's about support whether you have the support of the people you need to have support from, whether that be internally, externally, etc. is always really critical, because it can feel a bit lonely, otherwise. It can feel a bit like you're kind of out on a limb, you don't really know if you're doing the right thing or not.And if you're not getting a lot of recognition, which is very common, you can give up or just think, oh, I've got other priorities, I'll deal with that instead. So it's about keeping the faith, I guess and if you're really passionate about something, you might have to go alone for a bit, but hopefully you get there in the end. But even if you don't, you learn something. What's that line? You either win or you learn. So it's one of those kind of things. And not every project will be successful. But luckily this particular one was.
Sarah McLusky
And are there any places you've said there that if people are feeling that they're not getting the support within their own organisation, or they feel like they're really having to go it alone, are there any particular places you've found really useful for advice and support?
Catriona Liddle
I mean, I guess it depends on the type of project you have. And the people at Converge were really helpful. The people at... We've got various different collaborations with other universities. So you can... With us, it's people at the SRUC for Thrive. But it's also Heriot-Watt. We've got good relationships with them for their kit, which, if we couldn't get something funded, I mean, for instance, our project required a bit of kit, which was £65,000. We didn't have £65,000, but we knew somebody who had that bit of kit. So we were able to use those.
But from a helpful point of view, again, it depends on what status of your project for an entrepreneurship, I would always recommend Business Gateway as a starting point. Individual funding can be challenging to get as an academic if you're not used to writing funding applications. So any help you can get with funding applications is a big bonus.
So if your university runs courses in it, take them. If you've got anybody who you know in your organisation who is good at writing funding proposals, try and use them as a mentor or something like that because that is because you need to have a pretty high bar in order to get the funding. I mean the Innovate UK scoring system, I think if you thought you got 60 you thought you're doing really well, you needed to get 90% before actually ticking all the boxes before you've got any kind of funding.
It's not for a 10 minute, let's just give this a punt to see if we can get funding application. It needs time, you need support from your grants department, stuff like that, if you can. So you don't feel like you're doing it yourself. But be aware you probably are going to have a fair chunk of it yourself. We certainly did.
Sarah McLusky
Well, I wonder if with everything that you've, you've been through now and the different careers and things like that, how do you think of success in this kind of entrepreneurial world?
Catriona Liddle
I think I can look at it in two different ways I guess.
Success for our clients. I still get a buzz out of seeing one of the projects we’ve worked on in the supermarket. I know that seems a bit simplistic. But getting the project finished and to fruition is always good. Sometimes you finish a project and you’ve done it really well but for whatever reason it doesn’t go ahead because the company decides not to do it or whatever. I mean that’s still successful because you’ve still done your part successfully.
I think.
I come from a very Scottish Presbyterian background, so it's not for, so it feels uncomfortable to me to really promote success, if that makes sense. I don't know if that's unusual, but for a female entrepreneurial Presbyterian, it is a bit challenging because I think we are quite humble in our team that we don't, we're not really very good at promoting our success, which we need, which we could probably do with doing better. But I suppose a bit of recognition for the team when you do something well is always very good, but by recognition I probably mean exposure, more than financial whatever. But yeah a little bit of exposure and a bit of recognition from your peers is always very good.
Sarah McLusky
Yeah, I think that's at the end of the day, that's what really matters, isn't it? It's just feeling that satisfaction, feeling you've done a good job and that people have noticed in some way.
Catriona Liddle
Well, I think the interesting bit was when we first did the media for the PALM-ALT project, we thought we had one interview in Radio Scotland in the morning and it was just, oh my God, it just exploded everywhere. We were interviewed everywhere from the BBC World Service to Andrew Marr, to Evan Davis, to the Canadian people, to, you know, everything. And I was a bit thrown by one of the questions that I had by Andrew Marr. He said, oh, you'll be you'll be billionaires in this. And I think I was a little offended by it in many ways, because I thought, wait a minute wasn't why we started this project. Shouldn't it be about making sure that we can do this, if it's sustainable, if it's good for the planet, if it's good for this, and really the other academic and I just really want to write papers on it and get a bit of exposure. So I was kind of a bit of an, you know, how do you, he must have been working with too many self-serving politicians in his life, but it was a bit about that. We were never really looking at the money, which other than the fact when, and that's terribly naive, I know, but that wasn't really what drove us to do this. And every academic will have their own ideas. Not every academic wants to start their own company from an entrepreneurial point of view. They just want to be able to show that something is possible and it can be commercialized, whether that's them or not. Because it's not, I mean, I'm quite an introverted person. So I'm not somebody who wants to go and do that, but other people will be different and other people will have their own ideas of what entrepreneurship means really.
Sarah McLusky
Yeah, and I think that's one of the things we're hoping to draw out with this series is that everybody's version of entrepreneurship is slightly different and that everybody can find a model that works for them if it's something that they're drawn to.
Catriona Liddle
And they're part in it. They don't have to do from right at the start to right at the end. I mean, they can have they can be involved in entrepreneurship at various different parts of the journey and then choose to duck out or add in and take away the places that they want. And collaboration is always more important. So you might have a group of people who want to do that. And some people only want to join part of the journey. And that's and that's fine. That's good. You play to your strengths and what you actually want to do in life. Don't think you have to commit to everything. Just commit to what you want to commit.
Sarah McLusky
I think that is excellent advice and probably a good place to wind up our conversation. So thank you so much for taking the time to have a chat and sharing your insights with us.
Catriona Liddle
You're welcome. Thank you.
Podcast Outro
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This podcast was a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky. The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black and me, Sarah McLusky. The Academic Adventures Podcast is proudly supported by the Scottish Ecosystem Fund 2023-24.