PROMETHEUS PROcess contaminants Mitigation and Elimination Techniques for High food quality and their Evaluation Using Sensors Simulation

Gökmen V. (Yürütücü), Mogol B. A., Kocadağlı T., Hamzalıoğlu B. A., Göncüoğlu N.

7. Çerçeve Programı Projesi, 2011 - 2014

Proje Türü: 7. Çerçeve Programı Projesi
Başlama Tarihi: Mayıs 2011
Bitiş Tarihi: Nisan 2014

Proje Özeti

The PROMETHEUS project will help the European food industry to reduce consumer exposure to food processing contaminants without affecting food quality or microbiological safety.

PROMETHEUS builds on the previous EU projects HEATOX and ICARE. Its aims are:

To understand the reactions involving food components that form toxic contaminants.
To provide methods to monitor on-line, in real time, indicators of these reactions and produced contaminants.
To develop alternative processing technologies limiting contaminant formation while maintaining food safety and sensorial acceptance.
To demonstrate satisfactory upscaling of the new technologies to the industrial level.

Food models (infant formulas, biscuits, canned baby foods, and canned fish and vegetables) have been selected for their nutritional relevance to the consumer, especially infants and children. Processing contaminants (acrylamide, 3-monochloropropanediol esters, glycidol esters, furan, hydroxymethylfurfural and carboxymethyllysine) have been chosen for their toxicology and relevance to the food product and process.

PROMETHEUS will use a novel holistic analytical approach of continuous real-time on-line monitoring of process contaminant formation during food processing. Ambient mass spectrometry, fluorescence spectroscopy and image analysis will measure the relevant contaminants, their precursors and some quality indicators simultaneously. Nutritional and sensorial indicators will also be measured for each food products. The data will allow modelling of the reactions that form contaminants and affect food quality.

Innovative processing technologies will be used: vacuum baking, high hydrostatic pressure, ohmic heating, and ingredient microencapsulation.

The PROMETHEUS consortium has 8 research organisations and 6 industrial participants (including 4 SMEs, 1 large company and the European Confederation of Agro Food industries). The project outcomes will help to protect the consumers by providing them with high quality ready-to-eat food products. It will improve the competitiveness of the food industry by anticipating future regulations on neoformed contaminants, and help it to innovate by implementing new technologies in order to better control the safety and overall quality of their products.