Research

Bacterial biofilms in food production pose a critical health and safety risk. Effective cleaning validation processes are crucial to mitigate these risks. The project addresses the biofilm challenge by developing a fast, secure and efficient cleaning test method to enhance hygiene, prevent microbial accumulation, and validate cleaning procedures in industrial settings. The test innovatively incorporates the use of a biofilm imitate and the numerical simulation of the cleaning process. Specifically, it can be used to evaluate cleaning and decontamination concepts, to quantify the effort to clean production equipment and to identify the hardest-to-clean areas. Key objectives of the project include the selection and characterization of industry-relevant, dynamically grown reference biofilms, the development of a transportable cleaning and cultivation test rig, the generation and application of biofilm imitates mimicking the biofilm reference as well as to model and numerically simulate the cleaning behavior of the biofilm and its imitate.

CircularFood aims at making the best possible use of regionally available food by-products and creating new high-quality products from side streams. In a circular approach, high-quality protein components are obtained from various side streams of food processing using optimized pre-treatment and extraction processes. Depending on the functional properties, further processing and, if necessary, modification takes place with the aim of realizing a use as food or food ingredient. The assessment of possible uses is accompanied by an evaluation of economic efficiency and sustainability.

s part of a holistic strategy, the potential of climate-smart grain crops - specifically sorghum - is to be identified and subsequently exploited facing the challenge of a sustainable feeding of the growing world population. This is only possible with high-yield and weather-tolerant agricultural raw materials. The focus must be on crops that emit low levels of greenhouse gas while being resilient to heat and drought. Until now, sorghum has not been used as an ingredient in staple foods in Central European countries. However, sorghum shows a high field yield and is drought tolerant. Therefore, bundled research activities and cooperation with corporate partners are needed to establish the use of sorghum as a major ingredient in Western diet and to develop sensory accepted and high nutritional food products. Sorghum is already used as a staple food in African and Indian regions. However, the functionality and sensory attributes of wholegrain sorghum products do not meet the cultural European quality expectations. There is still limited understanding of the functional behaviour of different sorghum milling fractions in bakery and pasta products. It is crucial to investigate the impact of different milling fractions on technological functionality as well as on nutritional and sensory properties. Then we can adapt and control the milling process for producing high quality sorghum fractions. Furthermore, the grain and the milling fractions are functionalized by several approaches such as germination, enzymatic and hydrothermal approaches to optimize and increase the functionality in terms of digestibility and gas holding properties. Thus, sorghum-based gluten-free breads and new 3D printed texturates as well as sorghum-wheat-based breads, fine bakery products and pasta of higher nutritional value and sensory acceptability can be produced from climate-smart grains in Europe. The CLIC consortium consists of experts in the field of food technology, cereal process engineering with many years of expertise in the field of alternative cereal crops, i.e. University of Hohenheim, BOKU and HTLLMT Wels. Due to the similar effects of climate change on cereal cultivation, Germany and Austria are equally in search of solutions. Through a transnational project, the necessary knowledge can be multiplied, and the corresponding work packages are distributed according to the expertise of the research partners. The project will be coordinated by FEI (Germany) and ecoplus (Austria). The user committee consists of branches along the value chain: milling, additive suppliers, consultants, bakery and pasta production and related associations.