Friday, May 13th

This is the last day in Germany. We first visited Fraunhofer Institute in the morning. We left the hostel at round 8:30 and walked to Fraunhofer Instituted.

Christian Zacherl  picked us up in the reception and led us to a big cozy meeting room. She first gave us a presentation on the overview of Fraunhofer Instituted. She introduced the history and structures of Fraunhofer, as well as their research topics. In terms of Fraunhofer IVV, in Freising, they mainly worked on food process engineering and packaging technologies. Respect to the food field, they work on development of new food recipes,  sensory analysis, functional food etc, gentle food processing technology and bio-economy etc.. Indeed there are some new functional food, developed by them in the market, for example vieleicht sausage (low fat and enriched protein) and omega-3 enriched sausage specialties. They also developed some functional plant extracts, such as antimicrobial hop extracts, which are natural and can prolong shelf-life of food. Besides, they did a lot on developing new food packages, i.e. easy opening package, hygienic design and cleaning system etc..

The 2nd presentation was given by Dorothee Jacobs, a PhD student in Fraunhofer IVV. Her presentation is a part of her PhD project, on the impact flavor compound in lupin milk and fermented lupin cream cheese.  She found off-flavor elimination could be achieved by reduction of undesired odorants like hexanal and generation of pleasant odorants like 2,3-butanedione. She concluded that fermentation process possess the potential to increase consumer acceptance of lupin protein based food. 

Followed presentation was given by another PhD student in Fraunhofer IVV, R. Osen, whose topic was on the effects of cooking temperature on pea protein texture and properties during high moisture extrusion cooking. He found fibrous extrudates were obtained under moderate cooking temperatures between 120-140˚C. This was because the structure could be stabilized by covalent disulfide bonding. Electrophoresis showed the participation of legumin crosslinked through disulfide bonds at temperature above 100 ˚C. They did not find any peptide bonds or the degradation of amino acids aue to Maillard reaction under moderate temperature conditions.  After the presentation, Birgit and Osen had a very nice discussion about the effects of phase separation on the fiber formation. Indeed, this presentation was no in plan. So we made a huge time problem here. In order to catch the time, we had to cancel the presentation of Lu. Dimitri also had to skip a lot of slides in order to finish his presentation in 9 mins.

After the presentation from Fraunhofer IVV, Remko gave an introduction on our group and why we do this trip, followed by the presentations from our PhD students. Angelica first presented her project on isolation of hydrophobic proteins from green pant materials. Then Mauricio presented the digestion kinetics of proteins of plant origins. Lu’s presentation was cancelled due to the time limitation. Last presentation given by Dimitri, on biorefinery of sunflower press cake for food purposes. He did it within 9 mins.

Last activity in Fraunhofer IVV was the lab trip. We were divided into 2 groups and visited their labs as well as their pilot plant. After that, we left for the next destination, Mondeles.

After about 1 hour trip, we arrived at Mondeles at around 13:00. We had a quick lunch there. Remko was the first one who presented. As traditional, he introduced our group and why we were there in Mondeles. The followed presentation was given by Olaf Kortum. He gave us a general overview on Mondeles, the history, the structure, the research directions etc.. After then, we went to visit their labs and dairy pilot plant. Their labs were quite similar like ours. For example they have Mastersizers, HPLC, color meter, vacuum ovens etc.. We also found some interesting setups, namely Bioanalyzer by Agilent, which is used to measure the milk protein profiles and Karl Fisher, which test some properties of  the water molecules in food.

After then, we PhD students gave the presentation: Victor A on Membrane fractionation of agromaterials at high viscosities; Pina on towards more efficient adsorptive chromatograph (exchanged her turn with Anton); Fiona on formation of hierarchically structured fibrous materials from dairy materials; Anja on a food emulsion stabilization method by solid lipid nanoparticles; Anton on high efficient chromatographic fractionations of concentrated food systems and Angelica again, on presented her project on isolation of hydrophobic proteins from green pant materials.

After then, we finished all the events on this day and went back to Freising.