Russia’s politically-motivated decision to slash meat imports continues to be a bloody thorn in the side of the meat industry, according to an exclusive GlobalMeatNews survey.
Read more about it via http://bit.ly/29yfZzD
Friday, 1 July 2016
EU urged to recognise authenticity progress by food operators
Recommendations on how the public and private sector can promote integrity and authenticity in the food chain have been made at a conference.
Read more about it via http://bit.ly/29fy7ll
EU urged to recognise authenticity progress by food operators
Recommendations on how the public and private sector can promote integrity and authenticity in the food chain have been made at a conference.
Read more about it via http://bit.ly/29a9ypg
GFSI and UNIDO to help improve food safety in China, South East Asia and Africa
The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) around food safety.
Read more about it via http://bit.ly/29kImCC
Thursday, 30 June 2016
Label detects counterfeiting or tampering
Oxygen-sensing nanoparticles doped into food labels could be used to detect tampering or adulteration according to researchers from Xiamen University and the Fujian Institute Research on the Structure of Matter in China.
Many foods such as meat, potato chips and fruit, are vacuum or modified atmosphere (usually nitrogen or carbon dioxide enriched) packed where oxygen is excluded or reduced. The Chinese researchers have developed a simple and effective way of revealing if the oxygen content of the package has changed. They incorporate honeycomb-like nanospheres made from commercially available polymer into the label. The nanospheres change colour when exposed to oxygen so if the product is tampered with a colour change will be visible in the label.
"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first anti-counterfeit material that undergoes a colour transition stimulated by oxygen content," write the authors of the paper, which is published in the journal Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical (September 2016 edition).
They suggest that their technique for manufacturing the nanoparticles is relatively low cost and environmentally friendly compared to the production of other oxygen-sensing materials.
Read more about it via http://bit.ly/29aUcOH
Cricket farming in New Zealand
Alex Figg is one of three founders of Critter Farms, an enterprise raising an orchestra of crickets for food.
The University of Auckland final-year Masters of Architecture (Professional) student was researching sustainable architecture when he learnt the World Health Organisation (WHO) had declared our current agricultural practices unsustainable.
According to the WHO, by 2050 an estimated 9.3 billion people will require feeding, with protein being the nutrient in short supply.
While pondering how this would impact on future land use and architecture, Figg and co-founder Elliot Olsen began investigating alternative protein sources.
They discovered that crickets were a sustainable, efficient and nutritious protein source which far outperforms traditional livestock. The insects use 2000 times less water, 12 times less feed and emit a hundred times fewer greenhouse gases compared to beef.
High in protein, essential salts, vitamins, minerals and omega 3 and 6 fatty acids, crickets are a super food of sorts.
While the global population grows and becomes increasingly urban, there will be less arable land available for agriculture.
“Crickets don’t require earth to be farmed, so they can potentially utilise vertical space which can be designed into buildings,” said Figg.
With a personal goal to use truly sustainable practices in his life and work, Figg has also been researching a new biodegradation method to recycle problem plastics, utilising advances in environmental science. The idea recently won a Velocity Innovation Challenge Prize worth $1000.
In between plastic recycling and finishing his architecture degree, Figg and his colleagues at Critter Farms are prototyping cricket farming in Auckland with the target of helping enable a paradigm shift away from our dependence on land for food.
With approximately two billion people already eating insects to supplement protein, if you’re not keen on eating whole crickets never fear...
“The crickets are toasted and ground into a nutty flavoured powder which can be used as a tasty, high-protein food ingredient. I recommend you try it,” said Figg.
Read more about it via http://bit.ly/29fPHoc
Pepsi's move back to aspartame is symptomatic of the decline in the diet drink market
A serendipitous tasting of a chlorinated sugar compound by insecticide researchers in 1976 resulted in Tate & Lyle patenting the non-nutritive sweetener sucralose, in 1976.
At about 320 to 1000 times the sweetness of sucrose, three times the sweetness of aspartame and twice as sweet as saccharin, sucralose is stable under heat and over a broad range of pH conditions, and it can be used in baking or in products that require a longer shelf life.
By 2008, sucralose had been approved for use as a sweetener in food by more than 80 countries. As media reports of correlation between cancer and aspartame consumption in rats (but not in humans) proliferated and sales of diet drinks dropped, PepsiCo announced that in April 2015, it would be moving from aspartame to sucralose for most of its diet drinks in the US.
Just over a year later, the company has announced it will be bringing back aspartame-sweetened Diet Pepsi in the US this coming September and will be selling both aspartame- and sucralose-sweetened versions of Diet Pepsi.
In its effort to bolster sales of Diet Pepsi, PepsiCo ran into two problems. The first: many drinkers were shifting away from artificially sweetened diet drinks, sending sales nose-diving. The second: those who remained ardent fans liked the taste of aspartame and didn’t like sucralose.
US retail sales of Diet Pepsi fell 10.6% in volume terms in the first quarter of 2016; its soda market share fell 0.4 percentage points to 4.1% in the period, according to industry tracker Beverage Digest. Sales of Coca-Cola Co’s Diet Coke declined 5.7% over the same period. Diet Coke has a 7.4% soda-market share.
Sales of diet soda drinks in the US have dropped by nearly 20% since reaching a peak of $8.5 billion in 2009, according to market research group Euromonitor, and are expected to continue to slide. In contrast, sales of energy drinks are expected to grow from $12.5 billion last year to $21.5 billion by 2017, according to the market research group Packaged Facts. Meanwhile, since the mid-1970s, US consumption of bottled water has surged 2700%, to 38 billion litres in 2013, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation.
Read more about it via http://bit.ly/296EaDU
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