"Ready meals" are not 1970s TV dinners, but highly nutritious packages designed by chefs.

It is the leading edge of innovative food manufacturing in Australia.

There are new ways of producing juices under High Pressure Pasteurisation (HPP) so that they taste like the real fruit.

After decades of declining food manufacturing, a strong Australian dollar and struggling exports, there is now a renewed push to value add to fresh produce, extending its shelf life and making nutritious ready meals for export to Asia.

The move has been helped somewhat by the Federal Government's announcement last year to fund agriculture and food manufacturing, with a $63 million grant.

The CSIRO has worked with a company, Preshafoods, to develop new ways to treat fruit juice, benefitting growers.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Listen Duration: 4 minutes 42 seconds 4 m 42 s Professor Martin Cole at CSIRO Innovation in Food Nutrition and Bioproducts on advances in food technology ( Sarina Locke ) Download 2.2 MB

"HPP is an emerging technology that uses extremely high pressure rather than heat to kill yeast mould and bacteria," said Alastair Mclachlan, chief executive of Preshafood.

"The unique benefits of HPP are that it gives chilled foods extended shelf life without affecting the colour, flavour and nutritional value, and it's all about taste."

Another use for High Pressure technology is on ready meals.

The CSIRO's director of innovation in food, nutrition and bioproducts, Professor Martin Cole, said dinner was nearly ready.

"Ready meals as a business are really taking off around the world," he said, at the Future of Food conference at the University of Sydney.

"Everyone is time poor and yet everyone wants really good quality food,

"With that business is the shelf-life, and that's where the technology comes into play.

"It's based on High Pressure technology, which we've been looking at for over a decade, brought here from around the world.

"We've even taken some things from the CSIRO Total Wellbeing diet, so instead of people needing to read the books, these are ready meals.

"The HPP deals with botulism that limits shelf-life, so the food can last 30-60 days."

Another emerging innovation the CSIRO is developing with industry is introducing fish oil into GM canola to add Omega 3 lipids, essential for good brain development.

"At the moment, you feed aquaculture fish, fish meal and that's not sustainable. So with the technology we've developed, we take Omega 3 out of marine algae and put it into canola," said Professor Cole.

"So we now have a land-based form of Omega 3, one of the most characterised bio-actives and it's really good for your cardio-health, cognitive health.

"It gives our farmers a potential high return.

"This is the good stuff in terms of saving the wild tuna population."