WE ARE CONTINUING

04/10/23 08:02 AM Comment(s) By FIAL

FIAL grows from a federally funded Food and Agribusiness Industry Growth Centre to an independent, industry-led, not-for-profit organisation. Australian agrifood businesses will continue to benefit from the decade of knowledge and experience built by the FIAL team.

FIAL’s outgoing Chair, Professor Roy Green, said, ‘I am delighted that FIAL will continue its role as industry ‘leader’ to realise our vision of one sector, one value chain, and one food system.

“It’s about agriculture and food manufacturing working together to deliver domestic and global market success.”

Over the past decade, FIAL has driven the cultural and business change needed in Australia’s food and agribusiness sector and helped overcome barriers to innovation, productivity, and growth.

FIAL’s Managing Director, Dr Mirjana Prica, said, ‘FIAL has become the sector’s trusted partner. Building that trust is too valuable to lose, so we will introduce a new range of services in the coming months. We will build on our strengths around supporting market activities whilst attracting investment for the right business strategy and innovation.

“Not surprisingly, we want to share some of our key successes during this time. We were provided with $45.96M of Australian taxpayer funds to drive this change, and indeed we did with sector growth of almost 80%, and a contribution to Gross Value Add of $95.9B in 2023.

“Analysis by ACIL Allen concluded that our work, including innovation grants to turn great ideas into products and services, delivered a $231.7M contribution to Australian GDP and created 1481 full-time equivalent jobs in 2021-2022.

“For every dollar of Commonwealth funds invested in innovation and related activities, there was a return on investment of 14.9 of direct and indirect benefits.

“Extraordinary! Which is why we are not stopping anytime soon.

“We look forward to continuing to deliver solutions that lead to tangible impact and make a real difference to businesses, the industry, sector and Australia.”

ENDS

About FIAL

Food Innovation Australia Limited (FIAL) is the catalyst that encourages the food and agribusiness industry to work collaboratively to grow the share of Australian food in the global marketplace. FIAL supports the industry through targeted services including sharing knowledge, building capability and creating connections.

FIAL’s knowledge sharing, and capacity-building activities helped more than 9,000 businesses and other stakeholders improve their innovation and market readiness. Collaboration has been at the heart of these initiatives, with FIAL’s cluster program accelerating the growth of 12 regional clusters, targeting the 98% of sector businesses who are small to medium sized. Many of these businesses benefited from the on-line digital tools developed by FIAL such as FIAL's Australian Food & Beverage Catalogue, and Trade Barriers Register.