Campden BRI launches new food safety research projects
The member-funded projects fall within a number of distinct themes covering: food safety; quality and value; nutrition, health and wellbeing; resilience and efficiency; and skills and knowledge.
Under the safety banner is ‘Hygienic design: retrospective modification of existing plant’. This two-year project will update guidance for carrying out changes to an existing plant, ensuring that hygiene considerations are correctly managed.
Three-year project: ‘Food safety and traceability using protein profiling’, will develop confirmatory methods for food allergen testing and the detection of the allergen source and for the identification and quantification of selected peptides/proteins.
Another three-year project called ‘Quality and safety of cereal-based products and ingredients for the food and brewing industry’ will evaluate a range of analytical methods for cereals-based materials.
Shelf-life evaluation
A further three-year project: ‘Shelf-Life Plus’, will examine enhanced shelf-life evaluation using modern molecular profiling methods, such as gene sequencing.
Under the nutrition, health and wellbeing banner is a three-year project called ‘Ingredient selection to meet compositional and nutritional targets’. It aims to develop a database tool to guide ingredient selection during formulation against compositional and nutritional targets.
A one-year project under the resilience and efficiency category, ‘A practical approach providing systems to evaluate threats and risks to assure the safe management of the supply chain’, will develop tools to help firms evaluate and manage risks and threats in their supply chains.
Under the skills and knowledge category a two-year project aims to develop a definitive reference source for microbiological effects and food processes.
Novel natural preservative systems
Another one-year project will review novel natural preservative systems for use in drinks, sauces and other high water activity foods.
From the literature, this project will develop a knowledge matrix of natural preservatives with suggested product applications, presenting their effects on microbial stability, flavour, labile nutrient protection and shelf-life – to help companies identify clean-label options for use in new product development.
Campden BRI’s director general Professor Steven Walker will be chairing Food Manufacture’s one-day conference: ‘Food safety 2020: preparing your business for change’, which takes place at the Woodland Grange Hotel, Leamington Spa on Thursday, June 22 2017.
For more details, visit the Food Safety Conference website.
