Webinar: Enhancing Food Quality and Safety: Ingredient Research Advances for Clean Label Shelf-life Extension

Enhancing Food Quality and Safety: Ingredient Research Advances for Clean Label Shelf-life Extension

Shelf-life of a food product is limited either by chemical spoilage (oxidation, predominantly lipid oxidation) or microbial spoilage, or by both. Food spoilage not only causes economical loss to food manufacturers, but also is one of the major factors contributing to food loss. From a consumer perspective, many are still interested in a cleaner and familiar ingredient on the label deck, especially for packaged food and beverages. This offers both challenges at the same time opportunities as well, to come up with suitable ingredient and application approaches, to meet such consumer expectations. Especially in fat/lipid containing foods matrices such as snacks, fried foods, nuts, specialty oils, baked goods etc., the oxidative reactions result in off aroma, off flavor, and product discoloration in certain instances.

To address these, a variety of natural plant-based antioxidants (Herbalox®) and their synergistic combinations (Duralox®) have been developed that can offer similar or better performance to synthetic antioxidants in challenging applications, while offering the clean label advantage.

Furthermore, microbial spoilage and food safety are ongoing concerns with consumers. Temperature variations, extended distances of distribution, and demand for cleaner labels have all contributed to an increased risk of microbial spoilage in both minimally processed and ready-to-eat products. DuraShield™ Food Protection Blends are scientifically proven to be effective in improving shelf life and safety by combining traditional antioxidant products (including rosemary extracts and acerola) with natural cultured dextrose and/or buffered vinegar. They deliver minimal impact on taste and aroma and, in most cases, help to maintain a cleaner, consumer-preferred label. The proposed session, therefore, will feature light into the applied research advances into clean label shelf extension in a variety of food applications, with the purpose of avoiding or delaying food spoilage.

This topic will be presented by Andrew Lee, Ph.D,  Senior R&D Manager, Food Protection Kalsec Inc, Kalamazoo MI, USA