Quality counts: meeting the challenge of safer, healthier food

Indeed, a guarantee as to the safety of products is the minimum consumers can expect in today’s hyper-sensitive and media-savvy consumer culture. As a result, food producers are now turning their attention to wider issues such as quality, health and nutrition as a means of providing competitive differentiation. So what challenges does the food industry face in ensuring safety whilst also meeting these new aims? Food Solutions speaks to two experts to get their views.

Dr Volker Frost is International Sales Support and Account Manager at Büchi Labortechnik. With customers active in almost every market segment from feed to food and from chemistry to pharma, Büchi Labortechnik is able to draw many interconnections between the individual markets and thus support and advise its customers successfully.

Ilan Wilf has been serving as Atlantium CEO since June 2006. He brings over 16 years of senior management experience working in the US for multinational technology providers specialising in water and wastewater treatment in both municipal and industrial applications.

How would you say the objectives of food manufacturers and processors, and the challenges they have faced, have changed in recent years?

IW. Brand value has become the prime driver in the food and beverage industry, which has several ramifications. The first is the development of the ‘no tolerance’ rule – food safety is a critical issue to prevent microbiological, chemical and physical hazards in food production processes. F&B companies must move toward proactive prevention of problems, simple online monitoring and substantially reducing the exposure risk by increasing the treatment effectiveness, rather than constant inspection of production lines.

There has also been an increased drive towards health-focused products and better taste. Extending the shelf life has become a critical goal in order to reduce quality issues and bring additional profits. The key is to develop healthy products (witness the move from carbonated drinks to flavoured water in the beverage industry).

Balancing economic and environmentally friendly production has also become an important goal. For example, chlorine is cheap to use but generates DBPs; heat pasteurisation consumes gargantuan amounts of energy and begs for new solutions; whilst ozone presents a working-environment problem and is becoming unpopular.

Finally, there is now a greater demand for traceability. The need for better and more elaborate control over the disinfection process has raised the demand for cutting edge technology that will create the new standard.

VF. Basically there are two big challenges to be faced: one is efficiency and the other is quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC). Authorities are more strict and consumers are much more sensitive then they have been years ago. This is not at least due to the latest meat scandals - like weeks ago in Germany. The political pressure caused by such incidents results in an increase of regulations and the damage done to suppliers in that market can hardly be numeralised. Regarding efficiency: I think it is obvious, that in the food market there is a high demand for cost savings to maintain competitiveness. Classical, established analytical methods are obsolete and outdated today. They are too slow and cannot serve the needs of a modern, networking world.

The regulatory landscape in the industry is becoming ever more complex and strict. Would you agree with this observation? And how has this impacted your own business and that of your customers?

VF. I agree with that observation, and I see more regulations to come. Food manufacturers and processors will undergo the same changes that the pharmaceutical industry and their suppliers went through years ago. Certainly, the level will be different but generally speaking, the same procedures will be implemented: more controls on raw materials, ingredients, additives, etc.

It will start with ‘delicate’ products – market segments where consumers are very sensitive to any incident happening: baby and infant food, pet food and so on. The second wave, so to say, is on premium food products. Guaranteed quality, taste and authenticity are a must if manufacturers are to sell into the high price market area to demanding customers.

The Buchi business is directly confronted with these trends. As a manufacturer of classical, analytical analysis tools like Kjeldahl and extraction systems, it serves the food, feed, chemical and the pharma market. As a provider of solutions for the needs of our customers, we clearly identified these trends many years ago, and so we decided to implement near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy into our product range. And not only that – by focusing on fast fourier transform (FT) spectrometers we developed a system capable of replacing classical analytical methods by a high quality instrument at an attractive price level – the Buchi NIRFlex N-500. So our product range reflects our client’s needs. And with our long-term experience, we support our customers to pick out the most fitting equipment for a particular applications.

IW. I agree with this statement to the extent that regulations and more health-conscious consumers have created elevated accountability for food safety and overall quality in the market. The realisation and recognition of the adverse impact of disinfection by-products on production lines and final product quality is creating the awareness in the industry on the hazards of chemical disinfection, including ozone treatment.

Atlantium’s customers need higher performance and environmentally friendly technologies and capabilities at lower cost of ownership. This creates the impetus for our business. Conventional disinfection technologies, primarily UV, cannot deliver the needed results. This is where Atlantium’s Hydro-Optic-Disinfection (HOD) added value lies. We have designed a patented disinfection technology that combines the elements of physics, optics and hydraulics – all designed for maximum performance output, efficiency and quality – that results in substantially better ROI while maintaining lowest lifecycle costs. Our customers have been known to realise ROI in less than six months, see a substantial reduction in quality problems, increased product shelf life and quality and optimisation of product line performance.

What is your own perspective on how successful recent efforts to improve food safety in Europe have been? Have measures gone far enough?

IW. In my opinion, as food safety data is becoming more and more publicly available we are increasingly witnessing a self-policing phenomenon in the market. Consumers are better educated and demand higher standards, all in an effort to increase quality of life. This in turn creates – and will continue to create – the critical mass for better, safer products. Atlantium welcomes this change and will continue to diligently support the market place in this quest.

VF. I guess it turns out to be unfair giving a general answer to that question, if a wide market like the food industry is concerned. But – speaking as a consumer – I will try to give an answer: from a regulatory perspective, I have the feeling that the right measures have been implemented and are in place for the most sensitive food products and related production processes. And there is a positive trend to ensure the quality of high price branded products, too.

But the huge, remaining field is so far barely touched ¬¬–¬ not generally in terms of QC but considering the amount of samples tested and the efficiency of testing. Authorities and consumers will demand for more testing to ensure higher food safety – that’s for sure. This will cause a fast growing importance of external laboratory testing and screening tests.

What role do you think your own solutions have played in enabling the necessary improvements?

VF. Over the last few years, Buchi has focused efforts on providing more automated analyser systems like Kjeldahl autosamplers and multi-place extraction units. NIR spectroscopy is an excellent tool for fast screening. All these instruments are able to communicate with laboratory management systems (LIMS) and support the GaLP guidelines.

Lets take a closer look at NIR: not only that it is a fast technique that can detect many constituents at the same time, it can be used for various different applications, too. So one will only need one NIR system to do different jobs – NIR will give you the ability to check for nutritional facts and quality aspects at the same time. It is very sensitive to check water and fat concentrations and can easily be used to optimise these parameters in food. The obtained measurement results can be transferred to LIMS systems and be used to control production. Based on these data it is possible to optimise processes, tighten specifications and gain profits.

IW. Hydro-Optic Disinfection technology changes the paradigm for industries that need effective disinfection without disinfection by-products (DBPs), reduced quality concerns, increased shelf-life, improvement of the manufacturing process, and the risk of mercury in the water. It provides an environmentally friendly, fail-proof solution that significantly increases the user’s ability to maintain production stability and thus reduce production costs. For example, one of the HOD technology applications is replacing water pasteurisation systems (i.e. UHTs for Aseptic lines). We are able to consistently show up to 9 log inactivation of bacteria, which up to now has only been achieved with intense heat through a UHT system. Atlantium’s PR-20 system – a specialised HOD product for applications demanding highly aseptic water – was installed at a dairy plant and a beverage plant, cutting operational costs by over US$100,000. Cost reduction was due mainly to a sharp cut in electrical consumption and fuel oil usage (needed for steaming in flash pasteurisation), and considerable savings in reduced labour hours servicing the product line. The customer reported a drop in customer complaints for the particular product and longer product shelf life.

How does a manufacturer, processor or packager balance the need to invest in raising safety standards without losing their competitive advantage?

IW. Safety has a significant value. The market demands it and therefore, we all need to see it as an opportunity rather than a challenge. We must listen to our customers. Branding product safety as part of the product creates the competitive advantage.

VF. The keys are efficiency and automation. Irrespective of any market segment in food industry these tools will support competitiveness. Competition will become tougher and margins drop considerably. Even this is not really the case for premium food and high price products, the pressure to be more competitive is already present.

Investments into fast and reliable screening techniques like NIR will open new opportunities in marketing of products, too. By emphasising proven quality, tide specifications, controlled origin and/or production process, new and unique marketing tools are available. And especially when dealing with discounters these arguments count.

There is always room for improvement. Do you have any new developments in the pipeline?

IW. We are continuously working on new developments to meet the needs of our customers and their clients. This is a collaborative effort that can only be done with partners. Recent developments, such as Atlantium’s PR-20 was done under these pretences.

Our innovative Hydro-Optic Disinfection technology shifts the paradigm of companies seeking environmentally friendly advanced water disinfection by unleashing the true power of UV disinfection capabilities. It replaces complex disinfection processes with user-friendly, reliable and cost-effective technology.

Atlantium’s solution reduces chemical usage in the disinfection process and eliminates/prevents disinfection by-products. The lamp-out-of-the-water design provides additional safety, as it completely eliminates the threat of mercury contamination in the water – a grave concern with conventional UV systems. In addition, removing the heat source from the water substantially reduces the fouling potential in the system.

The ability to achieve up to 9 log removal of bacteria creates the ultimate disinfection system on the market today. Control and monitoring is achieved by dual sensors each tracking performance independently in real-time: one sensor measures lamp output directly while the second sensor monitors water UV transmittance to provide precise feedback for light intensity control and most optimal system performance. Readings from the sensors feed a sophisticated control system that optimises dosage and minimises power consumption

The control allows for continuous real-time monitoring and alarms, which provide the user with complete information and control over the disinfection system.

VF. For sure, there is no business without improvements. From Buchi you can expect to see new developments on classical analysis tools and NIR supporting automatisation – I am sorry for not being more specific here, but for those who want to know more in advance I suggest you refer to www.buchi.com in the coming weeks.