Wageningen Food & Biobased Research opened its new research facility for quality control in the fruit, vegetable and flower sector on October 6, 2017. The facility brings together knowledge and expertise in post-harvest technology and agro-food robotics. Worldwide, the need for quality conservation is growing: companies can keep their products fresher and reduce food waste using insights obtained at Wageningen.
“Companies benefit from a sustainable chain in which quality during storage, transportation and at point-of-sale is optimally controlled. Food losses are reduced and the availability and volume of quality food for the global population increases. Companies also enjoy a stronger international market position”, says Raoul Bino, General Director of the Agrotechnology & Food Sciences Group at Wageningen University & Research.
To achieve global sustainable growth in fresh chains a multidisciplinary approach is needed. In this renewed, modern research facility, expertise in the physiology, quality and shelf life of fresh products is combined with robotics and vision technologies. Research outcomes are translated, by Wageningen experts and companies in the chain, into methods that quickly, objectively and accurately measure product quality.
During the opening, on October 6th, Wageningen experts gave demonstrations around various themes. Circa 100 clients of WUR looked inside diverse research areas. These include the ATP Test Station, where cooling vehicles are tested under extreme climatic conditions from -20º to +50º Celsius; special packaging areas, and a large number of individually-adjustable mini-climate cells. There are also special areas for robotics and vision research where experts are developing new methods for extremely rapid, objective and accurate quality control.
Wageningen Food & Biobased Research has been researching the quality of fresh vegetables, fruits and cut flowers for more than 80 years – both nationally and internationally. For example, it is Wageningen experts who coordinate the GreenCHAINge Fruit & Vegetables research programme. The goal of this particular programme is to create smart chains that, via improved quality control, enable manufacturers to deliver top quality fruit and vegetables throughout the year. Wageningen’s research constantly facilitates unique innovations. An example is Cool – Research On The Move. This unique concept is a cooperation between Wageningen Food & Biobased Research and Fotein, in which knowledge and technology in the field of postharvest technology have been combined in a mobile research facility. This mobile research facility allows companies and governments, in emerging countries, to significantly increase the quality and shelf life of their products, expanding existing markets and creating new ones.

Wageningen Food & Biobased Researchhttp://tinyurl.com/y7qt22fu

The Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) has reported that ten Closure Orders were served on food businesses during the month of September for breaches of food safety legislation, pursuant to the FSAI Act, 1998 and EC (Official Control of Foodstuffs) Regulations, 2010. The Enforcement Orders were issued by the environmental health officers in the Health Service Executive.
Commenting today, Dr Pamela Byrne, Chief Executive said that the FSAI was now in a position to make available the full details of the Orders served on food businesses.
“The FSAI has been publishing the names of food businesses served Enforcement Orders for over a decade. Our systems and processes now enable us to provide additional information which is in line with our objective to increase transparency as a regulator and to raise food safety and hygiene standards in food businesses. Enforcement Orders were served on food businesses only when a serious risk to consumer health has been established or where there are a number of ongoing serious breaches of food legislation. We believe this initiative will help to dispel any misinformation regarding the reasons why Enforcement Orders are served and will also let other food businesses know some of the things to avoid in their premises.”
“There were ten Closure Orders served on food businesses in September and common non-compliance are filthy conditions and poor hygiene. Some of the specific reasons the Orders were served this month include evidence of rodent infestation; failure to maintain temperatures of foodstuffs; filthy conditions with aged dirt and debris; unsuitable food storage facilities; evidence of extensive cockroach infestation; and raw chicken stored on a dirty floor,” concludes Dr Byrne.  

Institute of Food Sciences and Technologyhttp://tinyurl.com/y8tlb9hg

Like fine wines, sea salts are artisanal products that inspire talk of terroir, texture and provenance. Now there’s evidence that they can also be sources of spoilage moulds.
New research from Cornell mycologist Kathie Hodge and doctoral candidate Megan Biango-Daniels reveals varying levels of mould contamination in commercial sea salts. Among those moulds were important food spoilage moulds like Aspergillus and Penicillium, and even some notorious producers of mycotoxins.
“This new finding contradicts the conventional wisdom that salts are sterile ingredients,” said Biango-Daniels. The research stressed the importance of understanding the risk of using sea salt during food production.
Starting with seven different commercial salts, the researchers extracted living fungi and grew them in the lab for identification. The fungi discovered in the salt have potential to spoil food when used as an ingredient and can introduce mycotoxins or allergens when consumed.
At the levels discovered in the study, about 1.7 spores per gram, you’re not risking your health by sprinkling sea salt on food you are about to eat. But big problems may result when sea salts are used at home or industrially to make cured meats, fermented pickles or brined cheeses that mature over time, when moulds introduced with sea salt can begin to grow and spoil food, maybe even rendering it toxic.
“Fungi can survive in surprisingly hostile places. They can’t increase or grow in a container of sea salt – nothing can – but spores of some fungi survive quite happily there. Later they can wake up and make trouble in our food,” said Hodge, associate professor in the Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology Section of the School of Integrative Plant Science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Cornell Universityhttp://tinyurl.com/ydc7abxq

Borrowing concepts from medical diagnostic devices, Colorado State University chemists have created a simple, cheap set of handheld tests that can detect the presence of many water or food-borne pathogens. If applied in the field, such tests could greatly reduce the number of expensive follow-up tests needed to keep the food supply safe from fecal contamination.
The new testing systems are innovations from the lab of Chuck Henry, professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry.
For their study, Henry and colleagues targeted a broad class of bacteria known as fecal indicator bacteria (FIB), which cause the highest number of hospitalizations and deaths from food poisoning. A common culprit: the use of unsafe water to irrigate green vegetables like alfalfa sprouts, spinach and lettuce.
While federal regulations require regular testing of fruits and vegetables for contamination with fecal matter, standard processes could use improvement. Common techniques like immunoassays and polymerase chain reactions (PCR) work reasonably well, but they can lead to false positives and require expensive equipment. The gold standard for bacterial detection is a lab culture, but this can take up to 48 hours to complete.
Henry and colleagues went for accurate, simple and cheap. They made two types of tests that detect an enzyme associated with the FIB bacteria. The first is a small strip of paper treated with a substrate molecule that changes colour when it contacts the bacterial enzyme – similar to a home pregnancy test. The researchers envision a smart phone app could be coupled with the paper test.
“We found that with filter paper, wax and a little bit of packing tape, we can do quite a bit of chemistry on here,” Henry said. “That’s about 2 cents worth of materials.”
Their second test is electrochemical and consists of screen-printed carbon electrodes on transparent sheets, which indicate the same bacteria by being inserted into a reader. The setup is similar to a home glucometer.
The researchers ran tests of contaminated water from a nearby lagoon, as well as water contaminated with E. coli and Enterococcus faecalis that was used to wash clean alfalfa sprouts. Both tests detected the harmful bacteria within four to 12 hours.
They next want to build a mobile computing platform for their tests. They’re working on a Raspberry Pi-based system that could perform kinetic measurements to detect changes in the bacteria levels over time, and automatically transmit the information to a cloud platform. The team is working with computer science researcher Sangmi Pallickara on these advances.
Henry explained that his lab’s new tests can’t tell exactly which bacteria are present, but they can detect the broad class of FIB bacteria that are usually responsible for foodborne illness outbreaks or closed beaches during the summer. “At this point, it is accurate but not specific,” Henry said. “This is the test that tells you that you need to do more tests.”

Colorado State Universityhttp://tinyurl.com/yag7chc5

Preserving the natural structure of plant-based food during processing can limit the amount of fat and energy absorbed by the body, a new study reports.
During this innovative multi-centred study researchers from the Quadram Institute, King’s College London, the University of Surrey and the University of Messina showed that preserving the natural structure of plant-based foods can limit how quickly fats are exposed to digestive enzymes in the stomach helping to regulate the amount of fat absorbed by the body.
Focusing on almonds, which contain 50% fat, researchers investigated the effects different processing methods had on how almonds are ingested by the body.
Despite being a high fat food, it has been shown previously that eating whole almonds doesn’t result in weight gain. Investigating why this might be, the researchers provided a study participant with two almond muffins, one made with almond chunks (2 mm) and one made with almond flour, which has much smaller particles (at less than half a millimetre).
The muffins were chewed as normal but instead of swallowing were put into an instrument known as the Dynamic Gastric Model, which accurately mimics the physical and chemical conditions of the human stomach and small bowel, enabling the researchers to calculate how much fat had been released.
After 60 minutes in the model stomach, which is the time calculated for this meal to pass through in humans, over 40% of the total fat content had been released from the muffins made with almond flour, but just under 6% had been released from the muffins made with larger almond chunks. Samples taken from the simulated small bowel showed that after 9 hours of digestion, almost all (97%) of the fat from the muffin made with flour was released, and only 60% of fat in the muffin made with almond chunks was released.
The researchers concluded that maintaining the structural integrity of the tough cell walls, which form dietary fibre, surrounding the fat-rich cells in almonds was the main factor in determining the digestibility of fats.
Dr Cathrina Edwards from the Quadram Institute said: “What we have found is that if the natural plant structure is maintained the level of fat the body absorbs is greatly reduced, helping in weight management and potentially helping to reduce incidences of cardiovascular disease.”

Health Canalhttp://tinyurl.com/ycwogram