He has urged the Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) to pull together the best minds from commercial, academic and government institutions to tackle global hunger.
Irranca-Davies acknowledged the "understandable desire" of manufacturers to protect their intellectual property, but said government could harness collaboration without putting "competitive edges at risk".
"We know there are great agronomists and great people in food science out there who can put solutions forward, but DEFRA needs to pull this knowledge together and take this forward," he said.
'A lot more can be done'
"It is true that among the major commercial manufacturers there is an understandable desire to protect their intellectual property, but we also know from other spheres of industry that, even when intellectual property is protected, a lot more can be done where there is a will to share expertise and resource with fellow commercial organisations, government and universities."
The MP for Ogmore in South Wales, who is the subject of this month's Big Interview, said collaboration was not a purely altruistic concept.
"We should be building links with many of these countries, including developing countries, for the good of them and us," he said.
"Interestingly, that is why food production has such an important role to play in building cultural and national links, either through exports or in terms of international development. It all helps strengthen the brand of the UK."
Irranca-Davies said, while this would be the first time food firms had come together to share knowledge, government had plenty of experience of facilitating collaboration in other spheres.
As an environment minister in the last Labour government, he was involved in bringing together firms working in marine mapping and technology to work together for commercial and public good.
"DEFRA brought together all those players, many of whom had not met before and were certainly not previously interested in how they could collaborate," he said.
'Hand-holding'
"Once we started the ball rolling, and with a lot of careful hand-holding, we found they quickly found benefits to sharing expertise and collaboration because everybody gained out of it. I suspect that is what we need to do with innovation within food manufacturing as well.
"I'm going to be spending quite a bit of my time in the next few months going around some of the biggest and the best companies including Nestlé, PepsiCo and McCain so I hope by the end of the summer I'll have a clearer idea of how we can take that forward if we we're in government."
Read our Big Interview with Irranca-Davies to find out why he believes the industry needs a bigger voice in government.