Canada’s Food Processors are transforming the food and beverage industry with healthier, more sustainable products. Ayming helps companies access government funding programs, and accelerate innovation that drives product excellence and long-term growth.
Food Processors
Addressing the key challenges
The Food Processors sector, spanning all segments of the food and beverage value chain, faces complex challenges in developing products that meet evolving consumer expectations while maintaining safety, quality, and profitability. From reformulating recipes to adopting sustainable practices, innovation in this industry must be balanced with strict regulatory, nutritional, and sensory requirements.
Many companies believe that only large-scale product launches or groundbreaking discoveries qualify for government funding. In reality, programs such as SR&ED tax credits and targeted government grants support a wide range of initiatives. From ingredient experimentation to process optimization, packaging innovations, and even trials that deliver unexpected or inconclusive results.
Key innovation areas come with unique hurdles:
- Ingredient Reformulation & Product Claims: Gaining a deeper understanding of how to remove, integrate, reduce, or replace ingredients while preserving or enhancing sensory (organoleptic) qualities and enabling specific product claims. This could include increasing protein content, reducing sugar or fat in dairy products, ensuring clean label compliance, and assessing the impacts of similar ingredients from different sources.
- Process Consistency: Achieving tighter control over production to minimize variability and maintain long-term physicochemical and sensory characteristics.
- Ingredient Impact Analysis: Determining how various components influence microbiological safety, nutritional content, product stability, and desired sensory attributes.
- Sustainable Packaging Development: Creating eco-friendly packaging that maintains processability, interacts well with the product, and provides the necessary barrier properties to achieve targeted shelf-life requirements.
- By-Product Valorization: Turning waste streams into valuable inputs for food or non-food applications.
- Yield Optimization: Maximizing efficiency from crop harvest through to the finished product.
- Lab-to-Plant Scale-Up: Translating successful lab-level developments into reliable, cost-effective industrial-scale processes.
- Nutritional Enhancement: Improving the nutritional profile of products without negatively impacting taste, texture, or aroma.
- Flavor Innovation: Enhancing flavor infusion or overall profile to meet shifting consumer demands.
- Intelligent Tooling & AI Integration: Incorporating smart machinery and AI-driven systems to monitor, control, and automate processes — a growing trend across all manufacturing sectors.
These challenges demand a blend of scientific expertise, technical innovation, and strategic investment. Funding programs can significantly offset the costs of R&D and process improvements, enabling companies to accelerate innovation while reducing financial risk.
At Ayming, we help Food Processors identify eligible projects, secure funding, and ensure compliance, so you can focus on bringing safe, high-quality, and innovative products to market.
How we can help maximize your results
We help Food Processors identify and capture all eligible activities embedded in your product development, process optimization, and sustainability projects. From reformulating recipes and improving nutritional profiles to scaling production and integrating smart manufacturing technologies, we ensure your innovation efforts are fully recognized for funding.
Our full-service support includes:
- Framing SR&ED-eligible activities: We work with your R&D, production, and operational teams to extract and frame eligible portions of your work. This may include ingredient reformulation, process optimization, flavor and nutritional enhancements, lab-to-plant scale-up trials, or sustainable packaging innovations. Ayming also trains and coaches your teams to spot eligible activities in real time.
- Clarifying eligibility when work is client-funded: Many food processors assume their activities aren’t eligible if done under client contracts. In reality, companies can often claim SR&ED if they retain risk and perform eligible R&D in Canada. We assess contract structures, intellectual property rights, and technical scope to determine what qualifies and how to structure future engagements for eligibility.
- Accurate cost tracking across contracts: We help you identify and separate eligible SR&ED costs from non-eligible commercial activities, including how to allocate staff time, subcontractor fees, and consumables used in eligible work. We also advise you on how to structure internal time tracking to clearly reflect SR&ED activities across product development and process improvement projects.
- Audit defense and compliance strategy: The SR&ED program is highly technical and continually evolving. Ayming provides early warnings on audit trends and policy shifts that affect the sector. If you are selected for review, we manage the end-to-end audit response to minimize disruption to your business.
Whether you’re reformulating products, enhancing flavors, optimizing processes, or scaling lab innovations to industrial production, we transform your R&D and innovation efforts into high-impact funding claims that maximize financial returns and ensure compliance.
We guide Canada’s leading food processors through the full spectrum of direct funding opportunities. From government grants and repayable loans to strategic programs that support product reformulation, process optimization, sustainable packaging, and smart manufacturing adoption. As a household name in the sector, Ayming has built a strong track record of helping food and beverage companies access millions in funding, making us one of the most trusted partners in the industry.
Our mission is to secure the capital you need to accelerate innovation, enhance production capabilities, and improve operational efficiency. We work closely with your leadership teams to align projects with federal and provincial priorities such as sustainable food systems, nutritional innovation, clean technologies, and advanced food processing. Our technical expertise allows us to craft compelling applications that not only increase your likelihood of approval but also strengthen your competitive position in a global marketplace.
Our comprehensive support includes:
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Grant Applications
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Pre-Application Strategy & Positioning
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Government Relationships & Advocacy
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Funding Landscape Insights & Strategy
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Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) Funding Strategy
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Post-Approval Compliance & Claim Support
Whether you’re reformulating recipes to meet new nutritional guidelines, upgrading lines with advanced batching and automation, adopting sustainable packaging, or scaling production for export markets, we help you build a strategic funding roadmap that fuels innovation, improves product quality, and drives measurable growth
More about Government Grants, Loans & Innovation Funding
We deliver a tailored funding strategy that aligns SR&ED tax credits, government grants, and loans across your product development and manufacturing lifecycle, maximizing total recoverable funding while minimizing administrative complexity.
Our consulting services include:
- Integrated Funding Strategies: Ayming works with your finance and operational teams to develop holistic funding strategies that combine SR&ED tax credits, government grants, and repayable loans designed specifically for food production and processing innovation. We ensure compliance across programs while avoiding overlap or non-eligible claims
- Stage-Based Alignment: Aligning funding sources to your project milestones, from early-stage product reformulation and lab trials to pilot production, scale-up, and full industrial deployment.
- Risk Reduction & Cash Flow Optimization: Layering incentives to reduce upfront capital risk, enhance cash flow, and extend your project runway.
- Policy-Informed Positioning: Ensuring alignment with evolving federal and provincial priorities such as sustainability, nutritional innovation, and smart manufacturing to boost competitiveness and funding approvals.
With deep expertise in food production and processing innovation, Ayming is your trusted partner in turning complex R&D challenges into funding opportunities through SR&ED tax credits, government grants, and other programs, accelerating your path from concept to market-ready products.
More about Strategic Funding Alignment & Consulting
Insights for Food Processors
Discover our latest thinking on trends, innovations, and developments shaping the food and Beverage processing sector.
Success stories
Our clients in the food & beverage industry
See how our clients in the food & beverage industry are driving innovation, cutting costs, and achieving remarkable growth with our funding support.
