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Issue 3 2007
4 September 2007
Leatherhead Food International (LFI) is a provider of scientific research, information and consultancy for the global food and drink sector. It is renowned for its comprehensive World Food Legislation services, applied Bioscience Research and Food Ingredient expertise. Paul Berryman gives an overview of LFI’s capabilities to develop innovative solutions to the major issues facing the food & drinks sector.
4 September 2007
MoniQA is an EU funded Network of Excellence (NoE), which works towards harmonisation of analytical methods for monitoring food quality and safety in the food supply chain. The MoniQA NoE (Contract N0. FOOD-CT-2006-36337) is coordinated by the Vienna-based ICC (International Association for Cereal Science and Technology) and is set to receive €12.3million by the European Commission for its activities between 2007 and 2012 within the Sixth Framework Programme Topic T5.4.5.1: Quality and safety control strategies for food (NOE).
4 September 2007
One of the points in the discussion of genetically modified organisms (GMO) is the consumers’ right to choose between foods from GMO (GM-foods) and traditionally produced foods. This discussion has led to the EU regulation requiring labelling of GM food products made from GM plants. However, since it is difficult to keep GM and non-GM plants materials fully separated during growing, transport etc., a threshold for labelling of GM foods was introduced.
4 September 2007
Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy offers users a rapid, non-destructive means of assessing a range of different food ingredients and finished products. Since its commercial development as a technique in the 1970s, it has been widely applied in a number of food sectors, particularly those related to cereal products. As instrumentation and data analysis techniques have developed, new approaches for the use of NIR have been generated through which its wider adoption within the food industry is ongoing. In addition to the work on NIR at CCFRA in the established areas of cereal compositional analysis, recent projects have also demonstrated a number of new approaches. Within these, the technique has been applied to other food matrices as well as to problems of a more complex nature for food materials derived from cereals.
4 September 2007
The automation industry is constantly changing, and the pressure is stepping up for Bürkert Fluid Control Systems. The past year has been very busy for the company as they strive to keep ahead of the major trends in the food industry. Mike Rodd, Segment Manager Process Control, tells Suzanna Bailey of the latest trends in the food industry and innovative company developments.
4 September 2007
Pulsed Electric Field (PEF) applications can be utilised to achieve disintegration of biological tissues or microbes. Various applications have been identified such as improvement of mass transfer during extraction or drying as well as gentle food preservation. The first commercial applications of the technique have been achieved. By development of equipment based on state of the semiconductor, equipment reliability and cost effectiveness of the equipment has been improved. The technology is heading for wider industrial application.
4 September 2007
Centuries ago, man observed that drying in the sun could naturally extend the shelf life of grains and other foodstuffs. Marco Polo, in the 13th century, is reported to have carried dried milk on his trips. Based on these observations man learned to commercialise this process for vegetables and later for dairy foods and ingredients. Nicolas Appert, in the early 1800’s, discovered that milk could be reduced to a third of its volume by evaporation. Later, Gail Borden developed a process for condensing milk by using a partial vacuum to remove moisture from milk and result in a much better flavoured product than by boiling at atmospheric pressure. Because of the perishable nature of milk products, work in the 19th century and subsequently during World War II continued to focus on preservation of this valuable food source. As a result drum drying and spray drying were developed and used extensively for production of milk powders.
4 September 2007
Fat and sugar are key nutrients in ice cream and very important as structural building blocks. But with consumers less keen on saturated fat and sugar in their diets, there is a greater need to utilise additional structure from the ice phase to maintain excellent sensory delivery.
4 September 2007
Canning has been a valuable form of food packaging and preservation ever since Napoleon offered a prize for the invention of a method of preserving food for military campaigns. In the UK there are 4 billion food cans sold each year and in the enlarged EU the figure is more than 30 billion. Canning is a microbiologically safe means of storing food for a number of years without refrigeration or chemical preservation and offers good, wholesome, nutritious food at affordable prices. Metal cans also have high recycling rates with large benefits of reduced consumption of energy and raw materials.
4 September 2007
Delicatessen slicers have long been recognised as a source for the spread of both spoilage and pathogenic microorganisms in the retail food environment. However, based on the higher prevalence of Listeria monocytogenes – a serious bacterial foodborne pathogen of major public health significance, in delicatessen meats sliced at retail and several major outbreaks of listeriosis traced to deli meats, delicatessen slicers are now well recognised as an important vehicle for cross-contamination. This article describes a series of factors that affect the numbers of Listeria cells transferred during retail slicing of deli meats and some means of minimising the risk of transfer.
4 September 2007
This article introduces the use of radio frequency (RF) and ohmic (OH) heating for meat pasteurisation and gives a brief overview of some UCD Dublin findings on the quality of OH and RF cooked meats.
RF and OH vs. conventional pasteurisation of meatIn pasteurising meat, the aim is to eliminate pathogens and reduce the level of spoilage organisms to give a reasonable shelf life under subsequent refrigerated storage conditions. Another important reason for cooking meat is to induce certain chemical reactions in a product which produce the flavour, colour and texture a consumer expects in a cooked meat. Conventional industrial pasteurisation of larger meat products is generally performed in a batchwise fashion either by placing products in steam ovens or alternatively by immersion in tanks of hot water. The difficulty with solids such as meat is that heat transfer within these products is predominantly by conduction which is relatively slow. The net effect is that it is necessary to leave the product in the heating media for a relatively long period of time for the interior to heat to an appropriate temperature. Meanwhile the outer surface of the product will have reached a high temperature at a much earlier stage which can lead to overheating in this area. Both OH and RF are forms of electro heating in which electrical energy is applied to products via a series of electrodes. In contrast to conventional heating, OH and RF generate heat within the product predominantly by internal ionic friction (although in RF a certain amount of heat will also be generated by friction induced by dipole rotation). These technologies differ from each other in a number of respects including the fact that in OH, electrical energy is passed directly into a food while in RF, electrical energy is first converted to electromagnetic radiation which is then applied to the food. The practical implications of this is that RF radiation will penetrate through conventional plastic packaging (metal clips cannot be used) without any requirement for direct contact with electrodes, while in OH, the product needs to be either unpackaged, in direct contact with the electrodes and subsequently packaged, or alternatively be in a sealed pack which has conductive regions which allow electrical current into the meat. Meat products have a certain amount of ionic compounds present naturally (e.g. calcium) with others (e.g. salt, phosphates etc.) added during product manufacture. These ions are dispersed around the product relatively uniformly. Essentially what happens in an RF or OH heating system is that an electrical field with positive and negative regions is formed. Under these conditions positive ions in the product move towards negative regions of the field and negative ions move towards positive regions of the field. Heating occurs in the case of OH because this field is not static with polarity continually changing, generally at low frequencies (50 Hz in Europe or 60 Hz in USA). In RF, polarity changes at much higher frequencies (e.g. 27.12 MHz). Therefore, no sooner have ions started to move than the polarity of the electrodes swaps and ions have to move again. The net effect of all of this is that heat is generated internally by friction (thereby avoiding the lag between the surface and the centre of the product).
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