CIM Conference 2017: 30-31st March
Holly Cuthill (researcher) and Natalie Chiu (CIM Outreach Officer) - University of Nottingham
The 2017 CIM conference was held at The University of Birmingham from the 30th to 31st March with 134 delegates and 62 industry representatives in attendance. Posters were set up for the full two days of the conference in addition to sessions running in break times and at the beginning of each day. The welcome and introduction was led by Professor Shahin Rahimifard. Emma McLeod from Mondelēz got the conference underway with ‘Challenges for the Future of our Food’ and spoke topically around sustainability and the importance of our research. The three topics focused on at the conference were Food Structure, Redistributed Manufacture and Food Waste.
‘Food Microstructure in the Era of Personalized Food Products’ by Professor José M. Aguilera Radic explained the term ‘neurogastronomy’ as being the study of food sensations in the brain. His talk on Gastronomic Engineering linked food engineering with material science and highlighted the important role chefs can play in development. Specific research has focused on modifying food structure to have a desired effect such as using protein to delay/restrict starch gelatinisation as well as using microgels as texture modifiers in foods. Dr Fotis Spyropoulos discussed ‘Formulation Design and Manufacture of Pickering emulsions’ and how they can be processed to have controlled release of molecules. ‘Manufacturing Pickering emulsions: pitfalls and how to avoid them’ by Dr Paul Clegg, a food physicist from University of Edinburgh, spoke about creating Pickering emulsions through increasing the interface and therefore creating more colliding particles.
Professor Alexander Mathys from ETH Zurich presented ‘Innovative food production systems driven by resource efficiency and sustainability principles’ with details on Life Cycle Sustainability Analysis (LCSA). Dr Patrick Webb spoke on his research group’s work on ‘Water sustainability for the food manufacturing industry’. Day one’s plenary talks concluded with Dr John Ingram presenting ‘Redistributing Manufacturing: localised food systems’ using case studies from around Oxfordshire to illustrate what the manufacturing future might be like.
The second day kicked off with Dr Gavin Milligan speaking on ‘Directions in Waste Valorisation, Case studies from FoodWasteNet’ which included some interesting statistics on the amount of edible waste from a variety of vegetables – leaving us with a bit of food for thought. Dr David Gray followed on introducing CIM research at the University of Nottingham with a focus on ‘Unlocking Ingredients of Value from Underutilised Biomass’. To finish, Professor Savvas Tassou from Brunel University presented interesting findings on different refrigeration systems in his talk titled ‘The RCUK Centre for Sustainable Energy Use in Food Chains - Research into Energy Demand Reduction’.
The afternoon of the second day was a Food Futures workshop led by Professor Peter Lillford and Professor Ian Norton. The workshop gathered members of the food industry, academia and other key stakeholders discussing and highlighting key areas of interests for food research in the upcoming years.
Sessions on the three key topics are mentioned below with the abstracts available by following the links.
http://www.manufacturingfoodfutures.com/
http://www.manufacturingfoodfutures.com/reports/presentations.aspx
http://www.manufacturingfoodfutures.com/documents/programme-manufacuring-food-futures-2017.pdf
