Food and Beverage Companies Can Receive Government Funds

Among various funds and grants available to food and beverage industries, Scientific Research and Experimental Development Incentive program (SR&ED) is one  of the lucrative one. Many food and beverage industries do not consider filing for SR&ED because they do not believe they qualify. While it is true that altering a recipe by itself does not constitute SR&ED, many companies in the food and beverage industry do have eligible projects in processing or packaging stages. Food companies often require striking a careful balance between taste and nutrition, or achieve an acceptable quality of product with different ingredients.

Such companies spend time and materials experimenting various process combinations, which most of the time goes unclaimed. Here is the list of typical examples of SR&ED eligible projects in food and beverage industries:

• Developing new products, recipes or formulations
• Improving shelf-life of products
• Making products more nutritious and more appetizing
• Developing fat-free, gluten-free, or sugar-free products
• Systematically improving food safety
• Producing samples for sensory evaluation
• Improving speed of processes while remaining quality consistency
• Modifications of the machines, equipments or conveyer systems
• Process automation and self-monitoring
• Scaling up production
• Reducing waste or developing recycling strategies
• Implementation of environmental friendly or green technologies

Whether your company is improving the production efficiency of its food processing plant, testing for longer shelf-life or working to meet health and safety regulations (e.g. Health Canada, the FDA, HACCP etc.), Kelid™ can help you to identify eligible activities and expenses to maximize your claim. It costs you nothing to ask for a meeting to see if any of your work this year is eligible for this tax credit, because we do not get paid until your SR&ED claim successfully goes through. We strongly suggest to check out Kelid’s interactive Self-Assessment Look Up to determine eligibility of your projects. We also invite you to join our monthly news letter or follow us on Twitter, Linked-in, Facebook, or Google+ for latest government funding news and articles.