Beccles

I was born in Hereford, and later my family moved to Shrewsbury.

As a child I was always curious about how things worked. My ability in Physics and Chemistry was not matched in Maths and this steered me toward Biological Sciences. The choice of Medicine became increasingly obvious.

I was fortunate to go to St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in 1970 and graduated in 1975. House jobs followed at St Thomas’s and Canterbury. Later junior jobs in Greenwich and Plymouth followed with the intention of doing Gastroenterology.

By 1980 with a wife and domestic ambitions I trained as a GP in West London and Surrey. I became a partner in Oulton Broad in 1983 and was able to indulge my Gastroenterology and became a Hospital Practitioner in Endoscopy. I retired from being a GP in 2012 and from Endoscopy in 2014.

My involvement with SITN allows me to try to keep abreast of some fascinating medical technology which would have been the stuff of dreams when I was a student.

More details to come......

Food, Food Science and me

The highlights and challenges of a 45year career in food product development and manufacture

Garry Nicolaou was a food consultant who worked in the industry for 45 years until retiring in 2024.

An Agricultural Science graduate of the University of Nottingham, Garry specialised in Food Chemistry, Food Processing and Food Microbiology. He was able to apply his degree to the development of new food products for major Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) companies, and the scale-up of concepts to commercially viable products that can still to be found in the market-place today.

Garry spent 32 years with Birds Eye Frozen Foods and was responsible for the design and development of much of the Birds Eye chicken products range.

In his talk, Garry will cover some of the fundamentals of food science, and how different food components contribute to taste, texture and overall quality of the food we choose to eat. He will give an insight as to how this is used in the food development process, from preparing early product prototypes through to scaling-up, and on to full production, siting examples and challenges he has encountered during his career. Finally, he will touch on where he thinks food will be going in the future.