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Issue 3 2008, Past issues / 18 August 2008 / Carol Wallace, Principal Lecturer, University of Central Lancashire and Sue Powell, Co-ordinator for the North West Teaching Public Health Network
All businesses need to make sure that they operate within the law for a wide range of measures, including health & safety, environmental issues, weights and measures, et cetera. For food businesses, it is crucial that the food sold does not endanger public health, therefore adequate control systems must be in place. In the UK and EU, food safety requirements are clearly identified in legislation so it is important that all food businesses are aware of and keep up to date with changes in food safety laws.
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Issue 2 2008, Past issues / 13 June 2008 / Tadeusz Matuszek, Gdansk University of Technology
In this article, a glimpse of theory and basic information regarding the pump data assumptions, together with the hygienic features of its elements, has been considered. It has been stressed that the main criteria for the decision taken with respect to the practical application of the variety of hygienic pump types should be the result obtained after the microbial test given.
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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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Issue 1 2008, Past issues / 28 February 2008 / Dr. John D. Marugg, Nestlé Research Centre, Quality and Safety Department, Microbiological Safety Group, Switzerland
Food manufacturers face challenges in optimising speed and efficiency, reducing product inventory, simultaneously responding to microbiological and chemical contaminants and entering the production process, via ingredients or the environment. Currently, most official or reference methods for pathogen or contaminant detection are laborious, costly, and often take a long time (3-7 days or longer) to obtain results. The application of rapid methods allows for an easy and fast response in the monitoring of raw materials and production environments, reducing the turn-around-time along the supply chain.
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Issue 1 2008, Past issues / 28 February 2008 / Konrad Grob, Official Food Control Authority of the Canton of Zürich, Switzerland
In 2004, the systematic non-compliance of lids for glass jars packed with oily foods was detected and compelled authorities to factually lift existing rules. This shows that not all industry performs satisfactory self control. It was a regulatory disaster and might, 4 years later, end in another regulatory disaster, if the major lid producers continue to refuse producing compliant lids.
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Issue 1 2008, Past issues / 28 February 2008 / Dr. Krassimir P. Velikov, Dr. Alois K. Popp, Leonard Flendrig and Dr. Eddie Pelan, Food Structural Design, Unilever Food and Health Research Institute, Vlaardingen, The Netherlands
Appearance is an important factor, determining the perceived product quality. Consumers usually develop strong associations through appearance and often, base their pre-purchase judgements on the appearance of the product. Colloids, because of their ability to interact strongly with light, either in simple form or organised in more complex structures, offer unique possibilities to control product appearance through manipulation of colour and turbidity. In this review, we present advanced approaches based on the application of designed colloids, from food grade materials to control product appearance.
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Issue 1 2008, Past issues / 28 February 2008 / Miriam Rodway, Secretary, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Industry Board
You most probably rely on it for the operation of your food processing and storage systems – but how much do you know about your refrigerating equipment and the environmental obligations you have for the refrigerant they contain under UK law?
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Issue 1 2008, Past issues / 28 February 2008 / Dr. Karen Middleton, Technical Contracts Manager, Food Hygiene Department, Campden & Chorleywood Food Research Association, UK
During manufacture, food can be exposed to microbiological cross-contamination from surfaces and air which may give rise to food spoilage and safety issues. The traditional approach to controlling such contamination has been to target specific sites within the manufacturing environment with cleaning and disinfection regimes.
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Issue 3 2007, Past issues / 4 September 2007 / Julian Stocker, H J Heinz Co. Ltd.
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.
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Issue 3 2007, Past issues / 4 September 2007 / Elliot T. Ryser and Ewen C.D. Todd, Michigan State University; and Keith L. Vorst, California Polytechnic Institute
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.
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Issue 3 2007, Past issues / 4 September 2007 / James Lyng, UCD Dublin, School of Agriculture, Food Science and Veterinary Medicine
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 meat
In 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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Issue 2 2007, Past issues / 23 May 2007 / Dr. Raymond Oliver F.R. Eng., F.I.Chem.E, Director of Science and Innovation at Cenamps
‘Nano’ or small-scale technologies are an exciting area of science involving work at the nano scale; far smaller than micro-scale technology and impossible to view with the human eye. No-one yet knows the extent to which nanotechnology could transform our world, but it is generally acknowledged that the technology could be applied across a wide range of industries, and benefit quality of life. Raymond Oliver, Director of Science and Innovation at Cenamps – a centre of excellence in nano and small scale technologies, and a technical advisor to the Food Standards Agency, speculates as to how nanotechnology could transform the future of food packaging.
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Issue 2 2007, Past issues / 23 May 2007 / Jarmo Markula, Innoliito Concept Studio
Did you know that Finland is the leader in functional food innovations? It seems as though the Finns turn their weaknesses into strengths; they may not be very talkative, but they are leading producers of mobile phones, and they may not have a very rich food tradition, but they are at the cutting edge in functional foods.
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Issue 2 2007, Past issues / 23 May 2007 / Huub Lelieveld, Unilever
The past ten years have seen many changes in both food science and technology as well as in food regulations. Contrary to the decades before then, most of it has been consumer driven. Consumers have become more aware of the influence of eating habits on their lives, in particular their health, and the food industry has happily tried to comply with their wishes with innovations, thereby stimulating research and development.
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Issue 2 2007, Past issues / 23 May 2007 / Karen Masters, Business Development Manager, Emergency Response Service
Shortly after Reading Scientific Services Ltd formed its Emergency Response Service (ERS) in 1987, the UK food industry faced one of the biggest, and most public, extortion attempts ever to occur. A former Metropolitan police detective, Rodney Witchelo, had begun his campaign to extort money by contaminating jars of baby food with fragments of glass and razor blades.
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