Active Food & Agriculture Economics & Business

STREAM 1: Park Royal PBIAA Net-Zero Food Supply Chains

Funder EPSRC (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation Brunel University London
Funding £2.7M
Period Feb 2024 — Jan 2028

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Park Royal, a single industrial estate in West London, produces 30% of London's food while employing 40,000 people across 1,700 businesses. This project tackles a concrete problem: the estate’s food manufacturers and distributors must adopt net-zero technologies, but they lack the coordinated push to do so at scale. The cluster already contains every technological challenge found in the wider UK food system, making it a perfect testbed. Researchers have spent months co-creating the programme with local businesses and civic partners, identifying the most effective ways to deliver change. If this succeeds, Park Royal will become a working model for circular economies and industrial symbiosis—where one company’s waste becomes another’s raw material. The estate will act as a flagship for the entire UK food and drink sector, demonstrating how a dense, mixed-use industrial area can cut emissions without shutting down. The impact is practical: cleaner supply chains, less waste, and a replicable blueprint for other food manufacturing hubs across the country.

View original technical description
Park Royal is one of the largest employment sites in the UK, with 1,700 businesses, employing 40,000 people, 5.3% of West London's workforce, and producing 30% of London's food. Furthermore, the cluster contains firms that face all the technological challenges exhibited within the UK food system as a whole. Brunel has worked with its civic partner West London Business, and with its HE partner Harper Adams University, to co-create a programme of work that focusses on the innovation challenges of the food manufacturing and distribution sector in Park Royal. This has included presentations at events of the Park Royal Business Group (which is run by West London Business) and individual meetings with its members, as well as several meetings with strategic partners in West London, that helped define the focus of activities and identify the most effective delivery mechanisms. With the networks we had already established, and the key stakeholders engaged during the co-creation process, the project will drive the uptake of net-zero technologies across the estate, build projects between businesses that create circular economies and exploit industrial symbiosis, whilst acting as an exemplar and flagship for the UK food and drink sector as a whole.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Geoffrey John Rodgers (Co-Investigator)Iona Huang (Co-Investigator)Savvas Tassou (Principal Investigator)

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Original classification

Research Grant

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