Our Bureau
West Lafayette, IN
Dharmendra Mishra, an Indian American associate professor of food science, has been selected to head the newly established Institute for Food Product Innovation and Commercialization at Purdue University, which focuses on assisting farmers in converting raw agricultural products into market-ready food and beverages.
The newly formed institute at Purdue University will be offering training and development support to agriculture producers with novel food and beverage product ideas. The new Institute for Food Product Innovation and Commercialization is funded by a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development.
“This grant is focused on farmers who want to add value to their product,” said Dharmendra Mishra, institute director and associate professor of food science. Entrepreneurs face many steps and challenges in converting commodity crops into new products for retail sales. “We want to remove those hurdles for farmer-entrepreneurs,” he said.
A joint effort of Purdue’s departments of Food Science and Agricultural Economics, the institute is part of the USDA Agriculture Innovation Center Program. The new institute can help train rural entrepreneurs in developing a recipe, making their product, educating them about the safety factors they need to control, and assessing their potential market.
Also providing resources to the new institute is the food science department’s Pilot Plant. After entrepreneurs develop their recipe, they need a pilot test before they begin full-scale commercial production.
“That’s where our Pilot Plant is important,” Mishra said. “We can create or simulate a commercial process in our Pilot Plant to know how this is going to behave in a larger-scale manufacturing environment.”
In addition to benefiting the economic well-being of the region, “we also want to create impact for the farmer participants and our students as well as the broader program of Food Entrepreneurship and Manufacturing Institute, FEMI,” Mishra said. “At any given time, we have many undergraduate students and graduate students working on real-life projects.”
