History of IFR
The Institute of Food Research was created in November 1986 but can trace its origins back some 90 years to the Low Temperature Research Station in Cambridge (run by the UK Government's Department of Scientific and Industrial Research) and the National Institute for Research in Dairying.
When the LTRS had to move out of its Downing Street laboratories in the mid-1960s, the Meat Research Institute at Langford near Bristol, and the Food Research Institute, at Colney on the outskirts on Norwich, were formed; by this time all three laboratories came under the aegis of the Agricultural Research Council. Some staff from the Ditton laboratory, in Kent, moved to Norwich at around the same time.
By the mid-1980s the renamed parent Research Council - the Agricultural and Food Research Council - was looking to rationalise the programmes of its institutes and the number of sites on which it was operating. This brought together the MRI, FRI and the food-related departments of both NIRD and the Long Ashton Research Station as the Institute of Food Research under one Director.
Further consolidation resulted in the closure of the IFRs Bristol Laboratory at the end of 1990, the movement of the Reading Laboratory from Shinfield near Reading onto the campus of the University of Reading in 1992 and, most recently, in 1998, the decision to consolidate IFR on a single site at Norwich with a strong commitment to future support from our parent research council - now the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. Consolidation onto the Norwich site was completed in September 1999.
The existence of a substantial archive of material related to food research in the UK during the 20th century stored at Norwich sparked the interest of colleagues from the Wellcome Trust's Unit for the History of Medicine in the Department of History at the University of East Anglia. A project to examine the history of food safety resulted in a paper published in Food Industry Journal (Volume 3, Issue 3 2001) republished here with permission - Download paper 
1971 - Early cool chain experiments with East Anglian Strawberries
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