FermenTasmania | Celebrating Australian Food and Agribusiness Innovations 2021
Fermentation is the mysterious alchemy that transforms food — from grains into bread, cabbage into kimchi, milk into cheese and grapes into wine. For the team at FermenTasmania, it’s also the process by which produce, people and place are converted from simple individual starter cultures into a complex connected community, united through shared knowledge.
Just as fermentation begins with a single microscopic cell, FermenTasmania started with a single question: what could we achieve if different fermentation industries shared ideas and experiences?
Based on the belief that industry achieves more through collaboration, FermenTasmania works on a ‘triple helix’ alliance model, combining industry, university and government to convert the potential of the fermentation sector into reality, cultivating a rich cooperative of creative food lovers and innovators.
In 2018, FermenTasmania received support from the FIAL cluster program, which provided not only much needed seed funding, but also formed a group of Australian food and agribusiness cluster champions in NSW (CCIC), Queensland (FAN) and Victoria (FFG).
FermenTasmania differs from other clusters in that it is process based, rather than delineated by geographic region — a difference that not only plays into the island’s abundance of value- added food producers, but also provides scope for a broader range of innovative developments including the use of fermentation to turn food waste into biofuel.
The cluster also operates outside the traditional membership model, offering services where there are significant gaps or a requirement to enhance and grow offerings. These include workshops and training, new product development, start- and scale- ups, public and private investment, productivity improvements, increased competitiveness, export growth and regional development.
