The Robert Mondavi Institute Center for Advanced Materials, Methods and Processing
By John M. Krochta

 

Today’s consumers want high-quality, healthful foods, and they want them produced with minimum impact on the environment. Achieving these goals requires a broad, creative and integrated approach that considers interactions among:

• food production factors (raw materials, water, energy and waste)
• food quality factors (including flavor, texture and nutrient content)
• long-term health benefits derived from the food

This is the approach being taken by the RMI Center for Advanced Materials, Methods and Processing (CAMMP).

The establishment of CAMMP was made possible by a $50,000 start-up award from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences through the RMI. The funds are designated to provide seed grants for new collaborative projects that cross departmental and disciplinary lines. Several new multidisciplinary collaborative research areas that have been identified within CAMMP represent synergy among faculty with expertise in:

• identifying food components and investigating their properties
• separating and creating novel and valuable food materials
• preserving foods using advanced techniques
• adding value to processing byproducts

The first projects and investigators awarded seed-grant funds by the RMI-CAMMP include:

•     Flavor and Nutrient Release from Food Emulsions and Nanostructured Liquids
      Stephanie Dungan, Department of Food Science and Technology, and Susan Ebeler, Department of Viticulture and Enology

Understanding the factors that control retention and rate of release of flavors and nutrients from foods is essential to optimizing food flavor persistence and nutrient absorption. This project involves development of tools to study flavor and nutrient release from micro-scale droplets in food emulsions and nano-scale structures in food liquids.

•     Identifying Wine Grape Pomace as a Possible Source of Bioactive Compounds
      Alyson Mitchell, Department of Food Science and Technology, and Susan Ebeler, Department of Viticulture and Enology

Wine and the grape pomace residue that remains after wine production have been shown to include bioactive compounds such as flavonoids and procyanidins that promote human health. This project examines the effect of grape variety and wine production practices on levels of these compounds in the resulting wine and in the pomace residue.

•     Wine Pomace-Based Extrusion Products
      Kathryn McCarthy, Department of Food Science and Technology, Linda Bisson, Department of Viticulture and Enology, and John Krochta, Department of Food Science and Technology

The bioactive compounds studied in the project described above can be extracted from the wine pomace residue for adding to foods. This project investigates the use of extrusion (a high-pressure mixing and heating/cooking process) for combining wine-pomace extract with milk protein and grains to produce health-promoting snack food products and edible packaging materials.

•     Formation of Reversible Nanopores on Foods for Incorporating Bioactive Compounds
      Pieter Strove, Department of Chemical Engineering and Material Science, Diane Barrett, Department of Food Science and Technology, and Michael McCarthy, Department of Food Science and Technology

Pulsed electric field (PEF) processing is a new technique capable of forming nanopores on food surfaces. This project examines the PEF conditions necessary for reversible formation of nanopores on food tissue, without damage to the food cellular structure, to incorporate food flavors and nutrients that improve food quality and nutritional value.

•     Mass and Energy Balances in Food Preservation (report) (figures)
      Charles Bamforth, Department of Food Science and Technology, and Paul Singh, Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering

Many traditional methods of food processing do not make the most efficient use of raw materials, water and energy, and they may yield products with inherent instability. This project makes an integrated analysis of beer brewing as an example of a traditional process to build a predictive model for assessing mass and energy inputs for new alternative processes.

Among the beneficiaries of these new multidisciplinary efforts will be graduate students working on the projects who receive valuable education in disciplines relevant to environmental protection, food quality and healthfulness. The new information obtained in these seed-grant projects will increase opportunities for additional funding from sources such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation which will allow even greater contributions from the outstanding faculty involved in the RMI.