Publications

Ready Meals Conference

This paper discusses the ready meals sector in the Irish market. It firstly defines what is meant by ready meals. Secondly, it profiles the Irish market for ready meals. It then briefly discusses some consumer trends influencing the growth in the sector and presents some consumer attitudes to ready meals before finally identifying some market and export opportunities and outlining some on-going relevant research work at The National Food Centre.

Date: 01 June 2000
Type: Event Proceeding
Size: 67KB

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Agri-Food Biotechnology - the Way Forward 2000

Biotechnology: a set of powerful tools that use living organisms, or components from those organisms, to make new products and processes, or modify existing ones; improve plant and animal productivity; and develop new and useful strains of micro-organisms.

Date: 01 May 2000
Type: Event Proceeding
Size: 61KB

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Objective Beef Carcass Classification

The McKinsey Report (Enterprise Ireland, September 1998) and the Report of the Beef Task Force (Department of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, June 1999) recommended that the Irish beef industry should move towards a mechanical carcass classification system as soon as possible. This could then form the basis of a quality based payment schedule agreed between producers and processors. A pilot study of three of the commercially available systems was carried out by The National Food Centre, Teagasc and The Department of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development in collaboration with Dawn Meats (Midleton) Ltd. This report contains the results and conclusions of that study.

Date: 01 May 2000
Type: Report
Size: 314KB

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National Soft Fruit Conference 2000

Good flavour in strawberry fruit is an attribute, which is gaining increasing importance in the production of strawberries. It is possible that the flavour of modern strawberry varieties has been sacrificed to an extent as a result of intensive production, and the tendency towards optimising yields, fruit shape and colour, and breeding resistance to pests and diseases. Flavour is now being ranked as being of equal importance with respect to other quality parameters. A research programme has therefore been put in place to identify the factors that influence flavour. The ultimate objective is to incorporate improved flavour into intensively produced strawberry fruits.

Date: 28 March 2000
Type: Event Proceeding
Size: 155KB