Food research priorities for 2009 announced

Food research organisation Leatherhead Food International (LFI) has announced its 10 core research projects in nutrition, food safety and innovation for 2009, which reflect the interests of its member companies.

LFI’s chief executive Dr Paul Berryman said: “This year, members voted strongly for projects on healthy eating, weight management and clean-label foods.”

Projects include one on the correlation of sensory and instrumental methods to predict shelf-life, another on the stability of natural colours, and a third designed to help consumers eat fewer calories.

Natural colours are often less stable than the artificial ones they replace and there is no standard validated way of predicting the stability of natural colours, which is a problem when they are added to products with a long shelf-life. “There is great interest in replacing synthetic additives, so our project on the stability of natural colours was popular,” added Berryman.

In the field of weight management, there is also a project to review emerging weight management ingredients and approaches to lowering the glycaemic response to foods.

With the Food Standards Agency encouraging manufacturers to reduce the sugar and fat in food and drink to address soaring levels of obesity, a LFI project on the effect of reduced fat and sugar on food safety is particularly timely. A further project will look at overcoming the difficulties of sensory evaluation of reduced sugar products.

Other projects will look at allergens and risk management, alternatives to modified starches, natural antimicrobials from microbial sources and one on the extension of hydrocolloid functionality and healthiness through processing.

The main aim of LFI’s allergen study into the presence of allergens in foods and food manufacturing sites will be to gain some understanding of the effect of different food processing treatments/cleaning reagents on allergen recognition. Once again this project is timely, coming as The Anaphylaxis Campaign charity reported that it had issued a record levels of allergy alerts during 2008.

Up to December 11 2008, The Anaphylaxis Campaign was involved in 60 alerts, compared with 58 in 2007, the majority of which led to product recalls or withdrawals. It said the likely explanation for the rise were errors that were now being recognised since the EU allergen regulation had taken effect.