Why Choose Food Research Lab's FRL as Your Food Product Development (FPD) Consultant and Partner?

There are several options in almost every product area in today’s market, and the difficulty is in coming up with unique items that stand out and connect with customers. Food Research Lab's Food Research Lab (FRL) takes a holistic approach to creating food and beverage products. We define, demographically target, and build effective goods through a sequential process for category selection and comprehension. The client can visit the lab to learn the process. We offer unlimited rounds of revisions to ensure customer satisfaction. The final product prototype, along with the documentation process, including the video (through email), will be shipped to the client, and in case the client is not satisfied with the video, a food technology consultant will visit the place for the product demo at the client’s costs.

What are the different forms that you deliver the Food Product Formulations?

The food industry is witnessing a new form of consumption. Keeping that in mind, we can formulate the products in the form of ready-to-eat, ready-to-drink, ready-to-mix, ready-to-serve, and ready-to-cook food products. We use ingredients that offer an added value to the development and improve its indulgence and sustainability in terms of its functional ingredients, plant-based food dyes, and natural preservatives with a clean label.

What are the sectors Food Research Lab cover?

We cover a wide range of sectors such as soups, sauces and dips, chips, tortillas, dry beverage powder, plant-based products, masalas, puddings, instant mixes and many more.

How is sensory testing been carried out?

Our sensory examination leads to the precise formulation and recipe recommendations. We develop data-driven design models based on sensory research and customer insights. The fact-based design methodology used by Food Research Lab reduces risk and gives our clients market confidence while cutting development time in half. With our dedicated sensory lab facility, our team takes satisfaction in creating and optimizing successful products in the marketplace, generating a favourable return on investment, and developing brand advocates.

Pulsed light technology

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Pulsed light technology

INTRODUCTION  

Pulsed light technology is a food processing technique in which intense, short-duration pulses of white light are used to kill bacteria on food, food contact surfaces, and packaging.
Pulsed light (PL) technology involves the use of inert-gas flash lamps to produce short-duration, high-power pulses of an intense broad spectrum of light within the frequency regions of ultraviolet (UV), visible (VL), and infrared (IR) light (200–1000 nm).
Pulsed light (PL) is a non-thermal technique used for food preservation among other relevant novel technologies such as high-pressure processing, pulsed electric fields and high electrical voltage discharges.

Figure 1: Pulsed light Spectrum

Principles

It is a non-thermal method of food preservation that involves the generation of pulsed light with gradually increasing from low to high energy and then releasing the highly concentrated energy as broad spectrum bursts, to ensure microbial decontamination on the surface of foods and food packaging.
Within a fraction of a second, the electromagnetic energy gets stored in the capacitor and is then released in the form of light within a billionth of a second, which results in power amplification and minimum additional energy consumption.
The inactivation efficacy of pulsed light depends upon intensity (measured in Joule/cm2) and the number of pulses delivered.

Advantages 

The intensity of light, which lasts for only a second, is 20,000 times brighter than sunlight, but there is no thermal effect, so quality and nutrient content are retained.
The xenon-flash lamps used in pulsed light treatment are more eco-friendly than the mercury vapour lamps used in ultraviolet (UV) treatment.

Disadvantages 

A possible problem of this preservation method is that folds or fissures in the food may protect microbes from being exposed to pulsed light. There might be some strains of micro-organisms that are resistant to the pulsed light treatment, for example, Listeria monocytogenes.
This technique for decontamination of micro-organisms is useful mostly in the case of beverages and the surface of solid foods, hence limiting its application[1].

Applications of pulsed light technology in food processing : 

Used in cold pasteurization of cold-pressed fruit juices and other liquids.
Disinfestation and preservation of food products with less heat to no heat involved.
Due to its superficial treatment characteristics, decontamination of food contact surfaces of equipment in processing plants could be achieved by PL technology.
There are several published results on the use of PL for the inactivation of microorganisms on food packaging materials[2].