Sustainable food security - FUTURE-FOOD

H2020 SC2 FOOD

Faster Upcoming Technology Uptake Relevant for the Environment in FOOds Drying (Future-Food) aims at the demonstration and first market application of an eco-innovative solution for drying of food products: supercritical CO2 drying. The project coordinator is FeyeCon D&I (the Netherlands) and the other partners are CO2Dry (the Netherlands), SP, Technical Research Institute of Sweden (Sweden), University of Padova (Italy), VNK Herbs (The Netherlands), Gent University (Belgium) and University of Belgrade (Serbia).

SC2 FUTURE-FOODThe new drying technology developed by FeyeCon uses only pressurized CO2 to dehydrate food, introducing several potential benefits - simplified process, energy efficiency, reduced carbon footprint, and improved product quality in terms of nutritional & sensorial properties, as well as microbial inactivation. This addresses both the need for ecologically sound food chains and the increasing wishes of consumers for high quality, healthy food.

Objectives

The main objectives of Future-Food are to bring forward the industrial implementation of CO2 food drying and minimize the risks for market entry. Several issues will be addressed to facilitate these objectives, for example:

  • Develop and validate product prototypes
  • Prove microbial safety and product stability benefits in long term storage/shelf life testing
  • Process validation and certification
  • Optimize the energy reduction potential
  • Further extension of pilot unit to widen process applicability
  • Evaluate market potential
  • Demonstration with industrial parties

Role of Ghent University

In this project, Ghent University will assess and optimize the inactivation of both spoilage bacteria and pathogens during the drying process with supercritical CO2 for basil, coriander and raspberries. Microbial profiling will be done to validate the process at lab-scale. Microbial safety and quality of the product will be determined using parameters of inactivation rate, sub-lethal injury, recovery, resistance and potentially even virulence (WP 3). In addition, models may be developed to evaluate the products stability and shelf-life from a microbiological point of view (WP 4).

 

WEBSITE: http://www.future-food.eu

Contact

Prof. dr. Andreja Rajkovic
Department of Food Safety and Food Quality
Laboratory of Food Microbiology and Food Preservation
Phone number: +3292649904
E-mail: