Food Products and Ingredients

Food ingredient fraud and economically motivated adulteration are emerging risks, but a comprehensive compilation of information about known problematic ingredients and detection methods does not currently exist. The objectives of this research were to collect such information from publicly available articles in scholarly journals and general media, organize into a database, and review and analyze the data to identify trends. The results summarized are a database that will be published in the US Pharmacopeial Convention's Food Chemicals Codex, 8th edition, and includes 1305 records, including 1000 records with analytical methods collected from 677 references. Olive oil, milk, honey, and saffron were the most common targets for adulteration reported in scholarly journals, and potentially harmful issues identified include spices diluted with lead chromate and lead tetraoxide, substitution of Chinese star anise with toxic Japanese star anise, and melamine adulteration of high protein content foods. High-performance liquid chromatography and infrared spectroscopy were the most common analytical detection procedures, and chemometrics data analysis was used in a large number of reports. Future expansion of this database will include additional publically available articles published before 1980 and in other languages, as well as data outside the public domain. The authors recommend in-depth analyses of individual incidents. This report describes the development and application of a database of food ingredient fraud issues from publicly available references. The database provides baseline information and data useful to governments, agencies, and individual companies assessing the risks of specific products produced in specific regions as well as products distributed and sold in other regions. In addition, the report describes current analytical technologies for detecting food fraud and identifies trends and developments.

New direction for NPD

Microscopy tools for product innovation

Cutting edge technologies to end food waste

Part 1 Understanding consumer food choice and acceptance: Integrating consumer responses to food products Sensory perception as a basis of food acceptance and consumption How does culture affect choice of foods? Psychobiological mechanisms in food choice How do risk beliefs and ethics affect food choice? Consumer attitudes to food innovation and technology. Part 2 Determining consumers' food-related attitudes for food product development: Methods to understand consumer attitudes and motivations and the effective use of these methods for food product development Using means-end chains to understand food consumers' knowledge structures Consumer attitude measures and food product development Measuring consumer expectations to improve food product development Boredom and the reasons why some new food products fail SensoEmotional optimisation of food products and brands. Part 3 Methods for consumer-led food product development: Sensory research and consumer-led food product development Opportunity identification in new product development and innovation in food product development Consumer-driven concept development and innovation in food product development Consumer testing of food products using children The use of just about right (JAR) scales in food product development and reformulation Conducting difference testing and preference trials properly for food product development Thurstonian probabilistic approaches to new food product development Using auctions to estimate prices and value of food products The use of partial least squares methods in new food product development Case study of consumer-oriented food product development: reduced-calorie foods.

From the President and<scp>IFST</scp>News

From Escoffier to Adria: Tracking Culinary Textbooks at the Dublin Institute of Technology 1941–2013

This study aimed to identify the development of new food products related to family farming from scientific and technological perspectives. Data were collected from the scientific literature and patent documents in the Scopus and National Institute of Industrial Property databases, using a combination of terms, such as “family farm* OR small-hold farm* OR agricultur* farm* labor OR farm* size OR peasant farm* OR agriculture* food* product* AND food* product*”. The asterisk (*) denotes a truncation character used in articles and patent databases to perform a search using multiple terms with the same root but different suffixes. A total of 716 articles and 532 patents were identified. The data from the scientific articles provide an overview of family farming participation in the development of food products and how products that are developed by family farmers resonate with society. The patent documents found showed the development of innovative production technologies, such as machines and production methods to improve the quality of the products sold by family farmers. Therefore, there is great potential for family farming foods to advance in this technological area, with the prospect of increasing publications and new patent applications related to this subject.

During the past decade, a large number of reports described the roles of in silico approaches in the development of new molecules in the field of pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals , food science, materials science, environmental science, etc. In silico techniques like quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR), pharmacophore , docking and virtual screenings are playing crucial roles for the design of “better” molecules that may later be synthesized and assayed. This chapter presents the currently available information on diverse groups of molecules with applications in agriculture and food science that have been subjected to in silico studies. A hefty numbers of successful applications of QSARs in the development of agrochemicals , food products and food supplements are thoroughly discussed. The QSAR studies summarized here would help readers to understand the proper mechanism for the activity of miscellaneous agrochemicals and food products as well as the interaction between the free radicals and antioxidant molecules. This chapter justifies the need to develop additional QSAR models in combination with other in silico approaches for the design of better agrochemicals, food and food supplements , especially antioxidants and flavoring agents, in order to explore the largely unexplored field of plant sources in addition to synthetic molecules as well as to reduce time and cost involvement in such exercises. Further, we have enlisted most of the available agrochemical, food and flavor databases for convenience of researchers working in the area along with an extensive list of software tools.

This article explores the significant impact that artificial intelligence (AI) could have on food safety and nutrition, with a specific focus on the use of machine learning and neural networks for disease risk prediction, diet personalization, and food product development. Specific AI techniques and explainable AI (XAI) are highlighted for their potential in personalizing diet recommendations, predicting models for disease prevention, and enhancing data-driven approaches to food production. The article also underlines the importance of high-performance computing infrastructures and data management strategies, including data operations (DataOps) for efficient data pipelines and findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) principles for open and standardized data sharing. Additionally, it explores the concept of open data sharing and the integration of machine learning algorithms in the food industry to enhance food safety and product development. It highlights the METROFOOD-IT project as a best practice example of implementing advancements in the agri-food sector, demonstrating successful interdisciplinary collaboration. The project fosters both data security and transparency within a decentralized data space model, ensuring reliable and efficient data sharing. However, challenges such as data privacy, model interoperability, and ethical considerations remain key obstacles. The article also discusses the need for ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration between data scientists, nutritionists, and food technologists to effectively address these challenges. Future research should focus on refining AI models to improve their reliability and exploring how to integrate these technologies into everyday nutritional practices for better health outcomes.

Cereal Grains for Nutrition and Health

Digitalising food manufacturing

Extrusion is a versatile process capable of producing a variety of new and novel foods and ingredients, thus increasing manufacturing opportunities. Further, it could provide nutritious, safe, sustainable, and affordable foods, especially directed at individualized consumer needs. In addition to past research efforts, more investigations should be conducted in order to refine, redesign, or develop new extrusion processing technologies. The present review highlights the current advances made in new and novel food product development by considering the extrusion process, the influencing parameters, and product characteristics and properties; the most promising extrusion processes that can be used in novel food product and ingredient development, such as extrusion cooking, hot-melt extrusion, reactive extrusion, and extrusion-based 3D printing; the possibilities of using various raw materials in relation to process and product development; and the needs for product development modeling along with extrusion process design and modeling. In correlation with extruded product development, topics that merit further investigation may include structure formation, plant and animal biopolymers functionalization, biopolymer reactions, process simulation, modeling and control, engineering and mechanical aspects of extruders, analysis of pre-processing treatments, as well as prototyping, risk analysis, safety, sensory and consumer acceptance.

Creative thinking in higher education can only be expressed productively within a particular domain. The student must have a strong foundation in the strategies and skills of the domain in order to make connections and synthesize. While demonstrating solid knowledge of the domain's parameters, the creative thinker, at the highest levels of performance, pushes beyond those boundaries in new, unique, or atypical re-combinations, uncovering or critically perceiving new syntheses and using or recognizing creative risk-taking to achieve a solution. Thus, a didactic intervention and its corresponding assessment was implemented with the purpose of enhancing creative thinking and improving the food product design and development processes in the studied Design and Development of Food Products and Processes capstone course. Assessment of creativity was grounded on the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), which is based on the idea that the best measure of creativity regardless of what is being evaluated, is the assessment by experts in that field. Therefore, a group of experts in the FE field were invited to evaluate capstone course final projects and developed food products by means of the Creative Thinking VALUE Rubric, which is made up of a set of attributes that are common to creative thinking across disciplines . Possible performance levels were entitled capstone or exemplar (value of 4), milestones (values of 3 or 2), and benchmark (value of 1). Instructor, peer-, and selfassessments were also performed throughout the course and on final project. Additionally, a Specific Course Rubric that included technical aspects regarding food product development as well as abilities of the team to present their product and answering questions raised during oral and poster presentations, and during tasting of developed food products. For this specific rubric, the scale varied from 1 (novice) to 4 (expert). Mean values from Creative Thinking VALUE Rubric assessment of final projects were 2.35 for Acquiring Competencies (attaining strategies and skills within a particular domain), 2.42 for Taking Risks (may include personal risk, fear of embarrassment or rejection, or risk of failure in successfully completing assignment, i.e. going beyond original parameters of assignment, introducing new materials and forms, tackling controversial topics, advocating unpopular ideas or solutions), 2.44 for Solving Problems, 2.44 for Embracing Contradictions, 2.40 for Innovative Thinking (novelty or uniqueness of idea, claim, question, form, etc.), and 2.24 for Connecting, Synthesizing, and Transforming. Regarding the Specific Course Rubric some teams performed better than others in selected aspects, probably due to the content and explanations given during presentations of their products. For the product design category, teams projects received scores higher than 2.5, which correspond to an intermediate level performance.

Trends in food sensory science