Project
Call for Partners | SYNHANCE - Synergistic Preservation Strategies for Enhanced Shelf Life
EU- and national-regulations, and branch organisations have set challenging goals towards the use of circular and sustainable packaging’s for the coming years. For food packaging, an integral approach is required. Wageningen Food & Biobased Research (WFBR) proposes a consortium that will investigate additive and possibly synergistic effects between sustainable packaging, product quality and food ingredients. The integral approach will ensure the shelf life and attempt to reduce waste of perishable food as for example fresh- and processed food. We welcome partners, who are ready to address this challenge, to join this project.
From a sustainable point of view, a revolution within the food sector is happening nowadays. Conventional fossil plastic and non-recyclable plastic packaging are getting banished and should be replaced by more sustainable solutions. Biobased plastic and monolayer packaging are developed, but do not yet reach similar packaging properties as conventional solutions. This gap engenders shortening of shelf life and increases the risk of food waste.
A multidisciplinary approach is required to tackle this issue. At WFBR, experts in sustainable packaging, food preservation and flavour will join forces to create a multi criteria decision support tool that will help food industries to convert their product portfolio toward a more sustainable products and to reduce the food waste.
The proposed project will compile three key-elements to create new food-designs:
- sustainable packaging
- product characteristic
- natural ingredients
The efficiency of new food packaging designs will be assessed at several levels:
- storage and packaging conditions: temperature, gas contents.
- product quality parameters : enzymatic activity, oxidation, discoloration, …
- flavour preservation: off-flavour analysis.
Scientific Machine Learnings will be used to build up models predicting the efficiency of the input parameters against shelf-life performance and reduction of the food waste of the final product.
The final project deliverable will be an integrated global decision support system that supports the user to select best solutions to support project shelf life, retain quality and reduce food waste. Thanks to this inter-disciplinary approach, the interactions between the input elements will be translated into shelf-life performance. The tools will allow the industrial partners to optimise their products and/or the packaging design in order to extend the shelf life of the product and reduce the food waste.
Partners
Food companies intending to use sustainable packaging are very welcome to join this consortium. Also, companies active in packaging solutions, ingredients solutions or processing technologies are invited to join this consortium. In return for in-cash and in-kind contributions to the project, partners will benefit from an integral approach that will help them to reach their sustainable goal, to ensure an acceptable shelf life and avoid food waste for their product portfolio.