Processing - Articles and news items

Major boost for food and drink industry

Issue 3 2008, Past issues / 18 August 2008 / Martin Lowe, Managing Director, CenFRA Ltd

Figures suggest that since the start of the 21st century, there has been a three-fold increase in the use of automation and robots in the global food sector. However, many food and beverage producers in the UK appear reluctant to adopt this technological advance.

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Breathing new life into hydrocolloids

Issue 3 2008, Past issues / 18 August 2008 / Dr Pretima M. Titoria, Section Manager: Ingredients, Leatherhead Food International

Food and drink manufacturers are under relentless pressure from consumers to produce products that can not only deliver exciting textures and tastes, but can also be healthy and shelf-life stable. This is then reflected in the challenge posed to the hydrocolloid suppliers and manufacturers, who must deliver thickeners, stabilising agents and gelling agents with specific functionalities that can meet consumer demand.

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Innovation directions

Issue 2 2008, Past issues / 13 June 2008 / Francesco Pantò, Roberto Ranieri and Renzo Rizzo, R&D, Barilla G. e R. Fratelli

Pasta is recognised as a family menu staple because it offers a number of unique benefits that other foods do not, such as a broad taste appeal, the versatility of usage, the convenience of preparation and being an inexpensive alternative to other main entrees.

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Conveyor belt hygiene

Issue 2 2008, Past issues / 13 June 2008 / Albert Amgar, General Manager, ASEPT

Conveying is a unit operation of food process engineering that aims at carrying raw materials, intermediate products or end products. This operation is therefore largely used in the food processing industry.

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Still key to safety in processing

Issue 2 2008, Past issues / 13 June 2008 / Sarah Krol, Business Unit Manager, NSF International

Increasingly, food safety regulators worldwide are increasing the enforcement of safety and hygiene requirements at the processor level. In recent years, food contaminations occurring at processing facilities have heightened public concerns about widespread foodborne illness outbreaks resulting from a single contamination incident.

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Maintaining quality

Issue 2 2008, Past issues / 13 June 2008 / Eduard Stempfel, Product Application Specialist, Team Leader R&D Services Bern, Shell Global Solutions

As food safety rises to the top of the agenda of food and beverage manufacturers, regulatory bodies and governments again and again, Eduard Stempfel, Shell’s Food Sector Product Application Specialist discusses the lubricants industry’s response to these trends for food grade lubricants and the need for the new ISO 21469 certification.

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Utilisation of durum wheat for yellow alkaline noodles

Issue 2 2008, Past issues / 13 June 2008 / David W. Hatcher and James E. Dexter, Canadian Grain Commission Grain Research Laboratory

Durum wheat (Triticum durum Desf) is a tetraploid wheat that is believed to have arisen from ancient emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum) in the Mediterranean areas of Asia, Africa and Europe (Abdel-Aal et al, 1998) in approximately 300 B.C. Durum wheat has hard kernels and is usually milled into coarse flour, known as semolina, primarily for the manufacture of pasta (Feillet and Dexter, 1996). Durum wheat is also used for couscous, bulgur and specialty bread products, particularly in Mediterranean countries (Quaglia, 1988). There is an advantage in having developed alternative uses for durum wheat to increase its marketability in years of high production. Most previous efforts to increase durum’s marketability have centred on its bread making capabilities (Edwards et al., 2007 and references therein).

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A farm to fork approach to lower acrylamide in food

Issue 2 2008, Past issues / 13 June 2008 / Frédéric Mestdagh and Bruno De Meulenaer, Department of Food Safety and Food Quality, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, Belgium

In 2002, Swedish researchers discovered that within certain foods, significant levels of acrylamide, a probable human carcinogen formed during heating processes such as frying, roasting or baking. Free asparagine and reducing sugars were indicated as the most important precursors. Over the past few years, significant progress has been made to reduce acrylamide formation.

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Novel(Q) robotics to handle food – sensitive and hygienic grippers

Issue 2 2008, Past issues / 13 June 2008 / Anders Pettersson, SIK

In 2006, at the Institute for Food and Biotechnology, SIK, in Gothenburg, a research project was started as a part of NovelQ1. The focus of this project is to develop a robot workstation with high flexibility and hygiene that can handle soft, variable and fragile products; in other words, to handle non packaged food products.

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Food processing contaminants: knowledge is key

Issue 2 2008, Past issues / 13 June 2008 / Richard H. Stadler and Viviane Theurillat, Nestlé Product Technology Centre, Switzerland

Food processing can be considered as a set of practices – using defined technologies and techniques, either individually or in combination, to transform raw foods / food ingredients into food ready for consumption. Some basic techniques of food processing are for example drying, curing, smoking, fermentation, canning, pasteurisation (by heat or irradiation), freezing/lyophilization and aseptic filling. Many of these processes are practiced in a domestic environment, i.e. in our everyday preparation of food in the home, or by the food manufacturing industry with the goal towards the production of foods that are nutritional, safe, tasty, and of consistently high quality.

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Texture improvement under pressure: fantasy or reality?

Issue 2 2008, Past issues / 13 June 2008 / Ans De Roeck, Daniel Ndaka Sila, Thomas Duvetter, Marc Hendrickx and Ann Van Loey, Laboratory of Food Technology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Today, consumers are demanding high quality, fresh tasting foods free from additives, microbiologically safe and with an extended shelf-life. The most commonly used preservation method has been thermal processing, such as pasteurisation and sterilisation. However, these processes entail considerable organoleptic and nutritional quality losses. Food scientists and the food industry are therefore continuously searching for novel, less degradative processing technologies.

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High pressure processing of foods

Issue 1 2008, Past issues / 28 February 2008 / Dallas G. Hoover, Ph.D., Department of Animal & Food Sciences, University of Delaware, Newark, USA

Foods such as guacamole, whole shell oysters, salsa, ready-to-eat meats, jams and jellies, salsa, chopped onions and peppers can be found in the global marketplace and are processed to some extent using high hydrostatic pressure. Essentially, this means the products have been submersed in water and then subjected to compression pressures approximately six times greater than the highest pressures reached in the biosphere; that would be pressures found at the bottom of the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean where, at 36,000 feet underwater, pressures reach 100 megaPascals (MPa) or approximately 15,000 pounds per square inch (psi). In comparison, packaged guacamole is pressure-treated at 580 MPa (100,000) psi for several minutes to preserve the product and deliver premium sensory quality.

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Packaging design for fresh produce

Issue 1 2008, Past issues / 28 February 2008 / Pramod.V. Mahajan, Oliveira, F.A.R., Montanez, J.C., and Iqbal, T., Department of Process and Chemical Engineering, University College, Cork, Ireland

Ready-to-eat, fresh-cut consumer products are one of the few segments within the industry that has shown consistent growth within the last few years. Cutting however, increases senescence rate and the shelf life of the products can be very limited. Modified atmosphere packaging (MAP), combined with a good cold chain can extend the shelf life, but challenges still exist, due to fresh-cut products containing much higher respiration rates due to the cell stress, caused by cutting.

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Structured approach reduces production costs

Issue 4 2007 / 16 November 2007 / Susanne de Haar, TNO

Food production processes are continuously adapted under the pressure of marketing demands, the availability of new technologies, and to reduce production costs. However, poor awareness about critical aspects of new products and processes may lead to disappointing results. For example, spoiled or overprocessed products. “A structured process validation prevents such unwanted effects of adaptations and saves time, energy and money,” say experts at the Dutch research institute, TNO.

Process validation is an early and structured assessment of the process performance: how the process functions under normal and extreme conditions, and how the process is controlled. In addition, all assessment data is well-documented.

Although it might sound obvious, process validation is not common in the food industry. “In many cases, companies assume they can modify their process and save time and costs. They do not realise that by carrying out these changes, products are more likely to lose their stability and may spoil more easily. Solving these problems afterwards costs more time, money and energy than performing validation studies in advance,” says Erik Hoornstra, project leader of Microbiology at TNO Quality of Life in Zeist, The Netherlands. Process validation takes a couple of days and saves time and money-consuming trial-and-error experiments. (more…)

NovelQ contributes to Europe’s innovation strategy

Issue 4 2007 / 16 November 2007 / Huug De Vries, Project Co-ordinator, NovelQ

The European Commission’s (EC) strategy in the past ten years has been changed from stimulating and supporting scientific projects in specific research areas towards more integrated research projects. The term ‘integrated’ refers to multi-disciplinary approaches to address and find answers for complex research questions. In 2000, the definition of the Lisbon Agenda – focused on three per cent innovation rates in Europe, thereby increasing the European competitiveness – has added another dimension, namely a new balance in supporting basic science up to applied research and demonstrations with the goal to achieve successful market implementations of scientific findings[1].

As a next step, the concept of European Technology Platforms has been launched. Here, the industry has been asked to take the lead in defining the European R&D agenda for the area in which they are active. Recently, the concept for the European Institute of Technology (the EU version of MIT in Boston, USA) has been presented. Strong footholds – either as virtual networks or physical centres – should arise that further strengthen innovations in Europe. The recently published EC Green Paper “European Research Area: New Perspectives” provides information for debates on joining forces in Europe. (more…)