Meet the Medical Research & Development Team

Stephen is the Head of Innovation for NZMP Medical Nutrition. He has worked in the NZ Dairy Industry for over 30 years in a range of R&D and business development roles.

Starting with cheese then moving through dairy flavours to nutritional snacks to sports nutrition to infant formula and ultimately to medical nutrition, Stephen has developed and maintained a passion for combining great taste and texture with excellent nutrition and convenience.

He has a wide breadth of expertise in the design of new ingredients and finished product solutions based on the end-user’s experience. Medical Nutrition is the ideal place to bring all of these aspects together.

Ine is our Technical Engagement Manager, who is passionate for technical and organoleptic product excellence and creating innovative nutritional solutions that contribute to the health of people and patients.

She has a special interest in creating compact, delicious solutions for medical ready-to-drink products. Long-term experience in designing high protein, nutritionally dense liquid formulations and protein ingredient design.

Current focus on translating NZMP’s extensive research and development experience through to the market; and working together with customers on e.g. formulation challenges and upscaling these formulations to commercial scale production.

Ms Ping Gao is the Medical and Sports Solutions Manger for the Medical Solutions team at Fonterra Research and Development Centre (FRDC), based in Palmerston North, New Zealand.

Ping has worked at Fonterra for 19 years and brings extensive experience with ingredient functionality, product development, commercialization of protein ingredients and dairy beverages. Ping’s areas of expertise include linking application needs and protein ingredients design, protein ingredients (WPI, MPC, WPC, caseinate) application in high protein RTD such as Medical Nutrition and Sports beverages, as well as providing customised technical support to customers on how to best use Fonterra’s protein ingredients in their beverage applications.

Since October 2017, Ping has been guiding NPD and NTD projects of dairy proteins for supporting delivery of Medical Nutrition and Healthy Ageing strategy.

As an experienced Nutritionist in both medical nutrition and consumer goods, Jacqueline promotes optimising both nutritional quality and sensory experience.

She has a special interest in the nutritional needs of patients and elderly with the specific challenges impacting these populations. Interested in finding new approaches to help people optimizing their nutrition while at the same time keeping it simple.

Longterm corporate experience in leading sensory and clinical trials. Jacqueline is an expert in nutritional composition in medical formulations, and is currently focussing on benefits of dairy ingredients in malnutrition, sarcopenia and disease to support the development of improved oral and tube feeding solutions.

Joanna is passionate about partnering with customers to make great tasting products to support people with specific nutritional needs.

Currently focussing on developing solutions that allow customers to solve formulation and processing challenges, enabling them to meet consumer needs.

Joanna has experience in product development of consumer goods from concept through to commercial scale up, and has a background in dairy science & technology.