I’d like to begin by sharing with you the importance of the work being undertaken by the wider community of expertise across science, validation and commercialisation.
The aim of the two-day International Nonthermal Food Processing Workshop – FIESTA Conference was to focus on sustainable, safe, and healthy foods, because we’re facing three global mega shocks that relate to food, and the work we’re doing is vital to that.
Mega shocks
The mega shocks the world faces are in food security; health; biosecurity and food safety. Think about food security over the next 40 years. To keep the expected population going, we’re going to need as much food as we’ve consumed in the last 500 years, but in a resource-constrained world with pressures on agricultural footprints, increasing soil erosion, peak phosphate and oil to name a few.
When we think about the technologies and the science we’re developing, we need technologies that can change our energy consumption and water use and we also need technologies that minimise food waste.
We waste nearly half of the food that the world produces. We need to value food more. We can no longer just have an emphasis on increasing production, we need technologies that minimise waste throughout the value chain, and we really need a competitive and closed-loop processing value chain.
In terms of health, the demographics and the incidence of chronic illness in most developed countries means that there’s absolutely no way their forthcoming health burden is sustainable. We have to have an emphasis on prevention and we know that diet, food, and lifestyle have a huge part to play in the onset and prevention of chronic disease.
So when we’re thinking about the technologies we develop, we need to think about how we can make processed foods healthier.
Three quarters of the international trade in food is for processed food – that means thinking about urbanisation and where the population is going to be growing.
The demand for processed food is only going to increase, so when we think about our technologies, we need technologies that meet dietary guidelines.
How do we get people to eat more fruit and vegetables? How do we make processed food healthier? And, how do we preserve food in a healthy manner that is still indulgent but convenient to eat?
In relation to the mega shock of food safety and biosecurity, think about the complexity of global supply chains nowadays. Food safety has become a global public health issue as well as a food security issue in its own right.
What we’re also seeing is the blurring between biosecurity issues and food safety issues. It used to be that a new food safety issue arose every seven years.
When I worked in the private sector, I used to get accused of releasing a new organism just to keep the research funding going, but these days there are new infectious diseases coming along probably about every 18 months, and three quarters of them come from animals.
With greater urbanisation we’re going to see more issues come through the animal chain, so we’ve got to have both animal and human health targets, and we need to think about this ‘one health’ approach in what we’re doing.
There’s a lot to think about as we consider these innovative technologies, but as we assess these technologies, think about food safety objectives and validation; think about technologies that guarantee and assure the integrity of your products; think about tamper-evident packaging; and think about technologies that will ensure the integrity of foods throughout the value chain.
Here in Australia, the food industry employs 230,000 people and provides 22 per cent of the gross value added in all manufacturing. The wider food and beverage industry employs 1.6 million people and provides $180 billion to the economy. It is a huge business for Australia.
We know that manufacturing is doing it very tough in this particular trade environment because of the high dollar, labour rates and cost of inputs, so the technologies we’re discussing also have to make our industry more competitive.
Export opportunities
We now have a huge emphasis on food policy in Australia, with the National Food Plan, a Prime Minister’s Taskforce on Manufacturing and more, so food is very much back on the political agenda.
One of the reasons for this is that we are sitting next to one of the fastest growing markets in the world. A study of 12 Asian countries looking at the projected consumption of food in this region revealed that by 2020 the demand for beef in Asia is going to increase by 50 per cent and for dairy by 55 per cent. For countries like Australia, that’s a huge food export opportunity.
Hopefully I’ve given you an insight into the theme of this series of articles. If you think back to the mega shocks I mentioned earlier, all three are relevant all the way along the supply chain.
Companies will increasingly need to understand what’s happening at the stages before and after them in the supply chain, not just where they sit and what they are doing.
An example is that of a dairy company undertaking a large export contract of functional milk powders to Singapore. It needs to be aware of seasonal variations in milk supply quantity and quality (i.e. composition) and the effects that variations in quality can have on processability and functionality of the powders as the quality, safety and shelf life can be affected.
The mega shocks all also have some kind of regulatory and international connection, so whether you’re looking to have equivalency of food safety regulations, equivalency in health substantiation or equivalency in terms of your environmental footprint, there’s a need to collaborate internationally.
For example, quarantine regulations are key to securing food supply and an example of where this can go wrong is the melamine contamination case in China in infant formula. Based on the current rate of population growth, food security could be a global issue, not just for poor countries.
The International Nonthermal Food Processing Workshop was a great example of international collaboration, with researchers, regulators and companies sharing information, results and processing techniques; implementing joint projects; and deeper collaboration of knowledge to gain maximum beneficial outcomes for the research community and ultimately consumers.
The workshop brought together the best international scientists and companies not just from Australia but from around the world to show the latest developments in nonthermal technologies and the outcomes couldn’t have been achieved without that international involvement.
This is the first in a series of articles based on presentations held at the International Nonthermal Food Processing Workshop – FIESTA Conference, held in Melbourne, 16 - 17 October, 2012. Further articles will focus on high pressure processed meats in the US; consumer perception and acceptance of nonthermal technologies; and ready-to-eat concept meal products developed for the workshop using a patented high pressure processing application.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dr Martin Cole is chief of CSIRO Animal, Food and Health Sciences. He can be contacted on 02 9490 8465 or martin.cole@csiro.au.
