During his trip to the United States in November 2022, Kyaw Thu Htet, CEO of MILS, visited the University of Georgia and had a discussion with the Director of the Center for Food Safety, Francisco Diez-Gonzalez regarding the collaboration opportunities related to ensuring food safety in agri-food value chains. He also had a fruitful discussion with Jamie Rhoads, Assistant Director of Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Peanut, and the Assistant Research Scientist of Crop and Soil Sciences regarding the potential collaboration to help Myanmar’s local peanut production and peanut oil milling industry.
After that, he had a tour led by James Gratzek, Director of Food Product Innovation & Commercialization Center (FoodPIC), a UGA extension that has been facilitating the commercialization of consumer-accepted food products by providing intellectual resources and physical facilities for both start-up ventures and existing food companies via multidimensional partners.
During his next stopover in California, he visited the Feed the Future Horticulture Innovation Lab at UC Davis to meet Archie Jarman, the operations manager of the lab and discussed potential further collaboration between MILS and UC Davis to help smallholder farmers with affordable solutions for food safety and quality. The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Horticulture's global research network advances horticulture and social innovations while empowering smallholder farmers to increase their income and better nourish their communities. The DryCard™, for which MILS recently acquired a production license for Myanmar, was developed by UC Davis researchers to determine if dried food is sufficiently dry to inhibit mold growth during storage. Farmers can reduce post-harvest losses in this way and better provide consumers and communities with higher-quality, safer goods.
Myanmar Innovative Life Sciences (MILS) signed the official agreement with UC Davis' Horticulture Innovation Lab in July 2022 to manufacture and distribute the DryCard™ in Myanmar. The pilot production is currently ongoing and will be followed by validation and field trials. For more information, please visit LOTEF page on CSAID, a multi-stakeholder collaboration platform led by MILS, at: https://www.csaid.net/post/low-tech-for-ensuring-food-safety-lotef.
With continuous efforts and collaboration with local and international organizations, MILS is helping food producers, including small-holder farmers, by providing technical assistance and services for ensuring food safety and quality and improving their productivity and efficiency, and eventually improving their market access.