Future of nutrition: Research and food industry join forces at UC Davis

19 Apr 2024 --- Ranked the leading agricultural school in the US, the University of California (UC) Davis underscores the need to join forces with the food and nutrition industry to solve global nutrition challenges. Nutrition Insight recently traveled to UC Davis to learn how the university cooperates with companies to spark innovation, solve real-world problems and prepare its students for a life after school.

The dean of UC Davis’s Graduate School of Management, Rao Unnava, Ph.D., details the business school’s work on building multi-disciplinary teams cooperating to solve problems in its Food and Agriculture Industry Immersion program. Focusing on innovation, this program combines business with UC Davis’ food, nutrition and agriculture research. 

“We felt that exposure to students to the food and agriculture industry, rather than a specific function in management, such as accounting, finance or marketing, was more important,” says Unnava. 

“This immersion that we have created is to focus on the future of food, given multiple developments,” he highlights. 

“There is an exploding population that the planet cannot support, climate change, malnutrition, places where protein is not available, and sustainability issues and water problems that people will face. We have to develop new technologies and figure out a way to make it tasty and nutritious at the same time.”

Industry immersion  
Unnava explains how the university’s Food and Agriculture Industry Immersion program brings a “flavor of UC Davis” to its MBA program. Starting with one class with Ph.D. students from different disciplines and MBA students, the university brought in executives from companies in its corporate network. 

“They brought complex problems that could not be effectively solved with somebody who has knowledge in only one management area. That started showing the value of what we’re doing — the fact that a Ph.D. is sitting next to an MBA and saying that doesn’t work because it will spoil the food if you do that, or other things that an MBA doesn’t think about.”

The industry immersion program brings students from different disciplines together to solve complex industry problems.He underscores that it was evident that the combination solved problems differently from only working with MBA students. “It’s a program that brings everybody at UC Davis together. We benefit from talking to people we wouldn’t normally talk to, and we participate in innovation.” 

Moreover, business executives praise the program because it focuses on people passionate about the food industry, bringing the “next factor in solving problems.” 

Unnava explains that over time, the immersion program sparked the interest of other companies, strongly supported by the business school’s Food & Agriculture Advisory Council, which brings in new companies and problems for students to work on. 

Workforce of the future
The Innovation Institute for Food and Health (IIFH) at UC Davis aims to bridge a gap between research and commercialization by facilitating innovation. 

John Melo, CEO at PIPA, who recently joined IIFH’s advisory board, explains that the institute aims to set up the future workforce and conduct innovation that connects future consumers and research into one. 

The institute identifies graduate students with a passion or thought leadership in research and health and food systems innovation. It then creates experiences for them in the industry. 

“We think that merging those — preparing students by giving them real-life experiences and making them part of the institute — actually sets us up to do better research and then impact society more by having these students go out and be prepared to deal with real-life projects and deliver impact immediately after they graduate.”  

“We are preparing the workforce of the future,” he adds. “We’re benefiting from it by getting inside great minds early for the kinds of needed food innovations.” 

IIFH’s fellowship program aims to create people that are bilingual in the science and business world.Accessible nutrition for all 
One of the innovation areas that UC Davis works on in the industry immersion program and IIFH is making nutrition accessible for all. For example, students in the immersion program worked on a problem posed by Once Upon a Farm, which wanted to sell its organic products in Lidl, explains Unnava. 

“But Lidl doesn’t buy it if it’s more than US$0.90, so how can we make organic food available to poor people in the country?” 

Similarly, Melo notes that “the greatest innovation may simply be to focus on accessible nutrition for all, in service of a straightforward outcome, which is longer, happier, healthier lives for all.” 

He adds that these concepts of accessibility and nutrition and the idea that nutrition is the best preventative medicine available are innovations. 

“We sometimes get carried away with thinking about the next frontier. The next frontier is already here; we’re consuming it every day,” he continues. “The reality is that making rich people healthier is not that hard. Making all people healthier — that’s a big deal, that is, I think, the real innovation.”

“Bilingual” students 
IIFH also connects academia and industry in its Innovator Fellowship, explains Dana Armstrong Hughes, the institute’s talent development programs coordinator. The main goal of this program is “to create people that are bilingual” in the science and business world.

In this program, Ph.D. students develop their entrepreneurial skills by immersing themselves in one of the institute’s food and health investment partners, mainly venture capital companies. 

She underscores: “Right now, there’s a big chasm between the research that happens in labs on campus here at UC Davis and the skill sets, expertise and knowledge that it takes to take that research and translate it out into a company, a start-up or a technology, anything that’s outside of the lab.” 

“Giving a student that experiential learning opportunity to immerse in the culture of business and the language, value structures, priorities and ways of thinking allows them to be both fluent in the science world, because they’re experts in whatever their field is, and then also in the business world.” 

Russelle Alvarez works with mass spectrometry to analyze glycans in a wide range of samples.From the lab to the real world 
Russelle Alvarez, a third-year Ph.D. student in chemistry and chemical biology, underscores the program’s usefulness. For his research, he works with mass spectrometry to analyze glycans in a wide range of samples, characterizing them and their functionality in a person’s health or nutritional state. 

Alvarez joined the March Group — a private investment holding company — as part of the fellows program. 

“I see the projects that I’m working on as an extension or an application of the skills that I’m learning here in the lab,” he explains. “The main project I’m working on is applying the data and analysis, such as the informatics pipeline I developed with the lab.”

“In our lab, we’re dealing with mass spectrometry, analyzing 100,000 or 10,000 compounds, peptides and proteins simultaneously. Then the question is, what kind of biological significance can you get from those numbers? We’ve developed statistics models to analyze and interpret those numbers into something we can understand and apply.” 

In his fellowship, Alvarez applies that same methodology to market and landscape analysis, “very out of the box,” but he notes that the statistics are sound. 

Armstrong Hughes notes that when students return to the lab, they know how to translate their research out of the lab, which questions to ask, what steps to take and who to talk to. 

“They know what the landscape of their field looks like because they’ve connected with companies and individuals in their area of expertise.” 

By Jolanda van Hal