NC_temp1023: Engineering for food safety and quality
(Multistate Research Project)
Status: Draft Project
NC_temp1023: Engineering for food safety and quality
Duration: 10/01/2025 to 09/30/2030
Administrative Advisor(s):
NIFA Reps:
Non-Technical Summary
Statement of Issues and Justification
Issues
The US food industry faces pressing challenges, including the need to produce nutritious, safe, and high-quality foods in an economical and sustainable manner. This complexity requires a multidisciplinary approach bringing together food engineers with diverse scientific expertise. The dynamic nature of the food industry demands not only innovative and sustainable processing strategies and technologies but also an understanding of how these technologies affect the physicochemical properties of foods and how the latter impact their nutritional, microbiological, biological, and sensory properties. Additionally, effectively utilizing the industrial byproducts generated from food production and processing remains a significant challenge in achieving circular and more sustainable food systems. Despite the increasing use of data-driven predictive models, the scarcity of complex data continues to hinder the development of comprehensive models for advancing our understanding of food processing systems and creating tailored processing strategies that result in foods with desired properties. Compounding the need for the novel processing strategies to transform our food systems is the imperative need to train the new generation of food science professionals with the technical, professional, and ethical skills that are necessary to address global challenges in food nutrition, security, and environmental, social and economic sustainability. In this view, developing educational outreach and extension programs focused on food engineering skills will be crucial to ensuring a well-prepared workforce that can meet the current needs of the food industry. To address the needs outlined above, this project will focus on: a) the development and characterization of innovative food materials, sustainable processing, and packaging technologies to ensure safety and enhance shelf-life, quality, functional and nutritional properties of food; b) the development of mechanistic and data-driven mathematical models to enhance the understanding and optimization of food manufacturing; and c) the use of pedagogical strategies to integrate cutting-edge food engineering research into teaching and outreach programs to enhance student learning, technology implementation, and stakeholder engagement. The broad range of multidisciplinary skills required to tackle these challenges underscores the need for collaborative efforts among researchers and educators from a wide range of expertise in food engineering, processing, and packaging at the land-grant universities across the country. This project is well-positioned to address the current needs of the food industry by fostering such collaboration.
Justification
Understanding and utilizing food engineering principles is critical in the production of safe, high-quality, and nutritious foods. Since food processing and manufacturing require an understanding of not only the processing systems, but also of food quality, safety, and nutritional properties, the field is inherently interdisciplinary. Furthermore, food engineering principles have a critical role in addressing key societal challenges in food systems, including sustainability and security of the food supply chain, health and wellness of society, and reducing food waste. In parallel to the diverse knowledge required for food production is the need for understanding these systems quantitatively, both through mechanistic and data-driven modeling. To address these significant societal challenges, there is an imperative need for collaborative mechanisms such as multi-state projects that bring together food engineering faculty from different institutions across the country. The multi-state projects provide a mechanism to seed early-stage collaborations that can blossom to successful interdisciplinary efforts with national and international impacts. NC-1023 is one such mechanism that enables these collaborations specific to food engineering and processing. There are several multi-state collaborations formed recently as part of the NC-1023 project that have had notable impact in research, teaching, and outreach of food engineering, which showcase the need for this collaborative group. For example, a collaboration across four stations (Michigan, Washington, Nebraska and Georgia), other universities, and the FDA worked on a large, USDA-funded SAS project on developing sustainable, systems-based solutions for ensuring low-moisture food safety. Similarly, a USDA-CAP project with collaborations across four stations (California, New Jersey, Maryland, and North Carolina) aimed to develop novel decontamination and sensing technologies to improve the safety of fresh produce. In addition to fostering research collaborations, connections made within NC-1023 have also resulted in successful education and outreach efforts. A notable example is the multi-institutional seminar course led by the Maryland, California, and Nebraska stations (with 12+ stations participating in the seminar each year), which was the recipient of a NIFA Partnership Award in 2022 for Integration of Research, Education and Extension. This course was started in 2021 and has continued each year as a truly multi-state effort to bring cutting-edge research topics to graduate and undergraduate students across the country. Finally, NC-1023 has provided a platform for the formation of an international food engineering professional society (Society of Food Engineering), which is responsible for hosting a bi-annual conference, the Conference of Food Engineering (CoFE). CoFE was held in September 2022 and again in August 2024, with the collaboration of members from Ohio, Minnesota, California, North Carolina, Maryland, Washington, and Oregon stations involved in the planning teams and attendees representing most stations. These notable examples highlight the importance of collaboration in bringing food engineering teaching, research, and outreach to the next level.
In the past 5-year cycle, the NC-1023 group has focused on characterizing new processing methods, food property characterization, and has had notable collaborations on teaching food engineering at both the graduate and undergraduate level. In the next 5-years (2025-2030), the group will continue to work on the development and characterization of novel foods and processing methods but will also broaden the work to include: (i) sustainable food materials and processing methods; (ii) mechanistic and data-driven modeling to enhance food manufacturing processes, and (iii) integration of cutting-edge food engineering research into educational and extension programs. These topics are based on the successful collaborations that started in the last 5-year cycle of NC-1023, where members have had a broad and significant impact.
The benefits of this multi-state collaboration project are numerous. The diverse expertise of the members of NC-1023 allows for a platform for research projects to integrate many facets of food processing and manufacturing (e.g. processing, safety, quality, packaging, nutritional properties). NC-1023 also allows for a resource efficient approach to collaborate and integrate across diverse skills related to food engineering. As a result of our collaborative efforts in these areas, it is expected that the impacts from this project will include: (i) research, development, and education efforts to address the diversity of food and agricultural systems across the US; (ii) an extensive network of resources that can be leveraged to address the sustainability, security, and safety of food systems and its impact on the health and well-being of society; and (iii) training of future professionals and outreach to stakeholders including industry members and policy makers across the nation. These collaborative efforts and their resulting impacts will enhance the competitiveness of US food industry as it works to fulfill consumer needs for sustainable, safe and healthy foods.
Related, Current and Previous Work
Objectives
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Develop and characterize innovative food materials, sustainable processing, and packaging technologies to ensure safety and enhance the shelf-life, quality, functional, and nutritional properties of foods.
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Develop mechanistic and data-driven mathematical models to enhance understanding and optimization of food manufacturing.
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Utilize pedagogical strategies to integrate cutting-edge food engineering research into teaching and outreach programs to enhance student learning, technology implementation, and stakeholder engagement.