Meet the Institute of Food Technologists

This newsletter is dedicated to the Institute of Food Technologists who have a lot to share with us.

I would like to introduce you to IFT. Since 1939, the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) has been a forum for passionate science of food professionals and technologists to collaborate, learn, and contribute all with the goal of inspiring and transforming collective scientific knowledge into innovative solutions for the benefit of all people around the world. As a scientific community grounded in purpose, IFT feeds the minds that feed the world. Their website, https://ift.org, is a wealth of information and includes so much information and many, many more articles that you can read on various food related topics. Below are a few articles from IFT’s website, with a link to each of the whole articles.

By Angela Peters, ISBA’s Food Law Newsletter Editor.

Please take a quick look at 10, as you are likely to start with 1.

10. Labeling Requirements and Implications for Foods Marketed in the US-a short IFT course on July 15 and 16, 2023. Details below for contact information.

1. The Missing Ingredient in FDA’s Proposed Rule

“Eat whatever you like, as long as you manage portion size and frequency.” That’s how I counseled my clients at the Manhattan fitness club where I started out doing nutrition counseling almost 25 years ago.

As a dietitian, my clients have included a wide variety of people—from New York financial service professionals to Medicaid recipients. Audiences can and do change, but my focus on healthy eating has remained the same: Each food decision is only one part of the whole day.

Which is where last fall’s U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) update on the use of the word healthy on food product labels comes in. The stated goal of the 2022 proposed update is to better align the claim to the current Dietary Guidelines. I was excited to see what the FDA proposed, so I rolled up my sleeves and eagerly consumed all 40,000 words, as well as the comments submitted over the next five months.

The proposed FDA update will likely fail to improve anyone’s health while potentially having some unintended consequences.

Simply put, the proposed FDA update will likely fail to improve anyone’s health while potentially having some unintended consequences. The intention was to encourage people to make healthier choices. But in reality, it runs the risk of alienating them. That serves no one’s interest.

PLEASE VISIT IFT’S WEBSITE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE: https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/digital-exclusives/the-missing-ingredient-in-fda-proposed-rule

2. What Is Crispr?

CRISPR is a defining feature of the bacterial genetic code and its immune system, functioning as a defense system that bacteria use to protect themselves against attacks from viruses. The acronym “CRISPR” stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.

https://www.ift.org/career-development/learn-about-food-science/food-facts/what-is-crispr

3. A CRISPR Food Milestone

Ever since CRISPR co-discoverer Jennifer Doudna suggested that this innovative gene-editing tool may have the greatest impact on agricultural applications, the food industry has waited in anticipation to see how long it would take a CRISPR product to travel from the lab to the market. Pairwise, a food startup based in Durham, N.C., was first to the finish line, announcing the U.S. release of its inaugural product, Conscious Greens, a CRISPR-edited super greens mix boasting better taste and an enhanced nutritional profile. Pairwise cofounder and Chief Executive Officer Tom Adams, says Conscious Greens is the culmination of a lot of hard work to diminish barriers people have when it comes to eating the recommended daily allowance of fresh fruits and vegetables.

“This is a tool that you can use alongside conventional breeding to precisely pick characteristics you want in certain foods,” he says. “In the past, breeders would have to decide: do I make this berry thornless, or do I make it taste good? CRISPR allows you to focus so you don’t have to make that choice. You can have it both ways, and consumers will benefit.”

PLEASE VISIT IFT’S WEBSITE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE: https://www.ift.org/search#q=a%20crispr%20food%20milestone&sort=relevancy

4. Outsmarting Food System Fraudsters

Following is an excerpt of this article from IFT’s website, ang it gives a concise summary of the food fraud problem and what the entire article includes.

The toll of deliberate misrepresentation of foods and ingredients is immense and apparently getting larger: Food fraud affects about 1% of the global food industry, with a cost of at least $10 billion to $15 billion a year, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), with a recent estimate by FMI, The Food Industry Association, putting the economic damages as high as $40 billion a year.

“When there are pressures globally on specific food ingredients or classes, there are opportunities for less-than-level folks to come in and offer what appears to be the same products but may not be, or a lower grade passed off as a premium product,” says Tim Lombardo, senior director for food consulting services for EAS Consulting.
In fact, experts portray a new “perfect storm” of opportunity for fraudsters because of the supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic, record-high recent inflation rates, and new commodity shortages created by factors ranging from war to weather disasters. The European Food Safety Authority estimates that food fraud incidents rose by about 30% during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example. And one of the latest scams involves sunflower oil that suddenly became in short supply because Ukraine is its biggest exporter. Historically, adulteration of sunflower oil has involved cutting it with castor oil and paraffin oil, but experts say it’s important to be on the lookout for new scams.

At the same time, the food industry, its partners, and regulators are throwing more and better resources at the problem than ever before, summoning new rigor in constructing and monitoring supply chains, displaying more determination to track down and prosecute malign players, and fielding a host of new technologies.

The practice is ancient, going back to brokers who put water at the bottom of olive oil amphora in the Middle East. In India, paddy workers would mix in white gravel with rice and slip papaya seeds in with pepper, says Kantha Shelke, founder and principal of Corvus Blue, a food science research and consulting firm, who witnessed such practices on her grandparents’ farm as a young girl.

A cluster of shocking cases about 15 years ago kicked off new alarm in the United States, including Australian exportation of horse and kangaroo meat to sell as beef in North America and the tainting of infant formula and pet food with melamine. Chinese manufacturers were adding the synthetic chemical—which has a high nitrogen content and is often used in plastics—to make it appear that their products were packed with protein. This led to kidney failure, more than 300,000 illnesses, and at least six deaths of babies, according to news reports, along with the deaths of scores of dogs and cats.

Today, the list of usual suspects for fraud includes olive oil, honey, wine, vanilla extract, and spices. “Each of those products are at higher risk from an inherent perspective because of what manufacturers can substitute or dilute,” says Dan Banes, global head of commercial markets for Exiger, a risk manager for supply chains. “And they’re at higher price points, so there are economic opportunities to dilute with something cheaper and still sell at a higher price.”

PLEASE VISIT IFT’S WEBSITE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE: https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-magazine/issues/2023/june/features/outsmarting-food-system-fraudsters

5. Can We Future Proof the Food System?

Adapting to climate change. Leaner, cleaner, and greener. The escalating health imperative. Geopolitical shifts. Diving into digital. Increasingly autonomous. Unlocking the human dimension.

The impact of extreme weather events on our food supply, the increasing costs of healthy, nutritious foods, geopolitical shifts impacting the availability and movement of ingredients and goods, and the need for novel protein sources are just a few examples of how these megatrends present themselves within the context of the global food system. There are dozens more.

Academia, industry, and government are actively working to create the transformational change our food system needs but the challenges are great. Ground-breaking innovation has never been more critical, and it cannot occur in silos. This imperative is the foundation for the most impactful event the global science of food community is invited to participate in this year.

PLEASE VISIT IFT’S WEBSITE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE: https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-magazine/issues/2023/march/columns/presidents-message-can-we-future-proof-food-system

6. EP 4: Consumers Don’t Want to Change, So Why Are They

Most management consultants would say their greatest challenges are the ones that involve change management. When consumers find a set of products and foods they like, they typically don’t want those things to change. Yet we are seeing more change in the space of consumer wants and needs than ever before. This podcast we hear from a food scientist and anthropologist about what the plant-based food industry can learn from Tesla, or about the importance of understanding the ‘Job’ consumers are hiring your product to do.

https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/podcasts/scidish/episode-4-consumers-do-not-want-to-change

7. A Historical Look at Food Safety

While it may seem that the incidence of foodborne illnesses increases year to year, the reality is people have been getting sick from foodborne illnesses since the beginning of time. Indeed, many food preparation techniques, such as cooking, salting, canning, and fermentation, were borne out of a motivation to reduce foodborne illness. The enhanced capabilities of the modern food safety system to detect pathogens and issue recalls has only increased our awareness and actions to mitigate food safety emergencies.

Historical accounts of foodborne illness date back to antiquity. The first suggested documented case of a known foodborne illness dates back to 323 B.C. According to doctors at the University of Maryland who studied historical accounts of Alexander the Great’s symptoms and death, the ancient ruler is believed to have died from typhoid fever, which was caused by Salmonella typhi.

Food Safety through the Years

Although the science and technology we benefit from today did not exist hundreds of years ago, people have long been concerned about food quality and safety. It is believed that the first English food law – the Assize of Bread ­– was proclaimed by King John of England in 1202, prohibiting adulteration of bread with ingredients such as ground peas or beans. American colonists enacted a replica of the Assize of Bread regulation in 1646, and later passed the Massachusetts Act Against Selling Unwholesome Provisions in 1785, which is believed to be the first U.S. food safety law.

Major food safety developments include:

1862 – USDA and FDA Formed
President Abraham Lincoln formed the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and appointed chemist Charles M. Wetherill to lead the Division of Chemistry, which would become the Bureau of Chemistry in 1901 and the Food and Drug Administration in 1906.

PLEASE VISIT IFT’S WEBSITE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE: https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/blog/2019/september/a-historical-look-at-food-safety

8. Food Packaging Migrants: Hazardous or Insignificant?

PLEASE VISIT IFT’S WEBSITE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE: https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-magazine/issues/2009/october/columns/packaging

9. Reducing Food Waste Via Active Packaging

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, “[i]f food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitting country in the world” behind only China and the United States (FAO 2015, Figure 1). Although consumers are increasingly aware of the environmental damage from polymeric (plastic) packaging, there remains a substantial, yet less visible, ecological impact of wasted food inside the packaging. Most recent estimates of global annual greenhouse gas emissions caused by food waste (4.4 GtCO2 eq) are greater than emissions from the transportation (1.9 GtCO2 eq) and electricity (1.8 GtCO2 eq) sectors combined in the United States alone (EPA 2020). Greenhouse gas emissions for food waste are estimated through life cycle assessment, which considers emissions at all stages of food production in proportion to global food waste.

PLEASE VISIT IFT’S WEBSITE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE: https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-magazine/issues/2020/september/features/reducing-food-waste-via-active-packaging

10. Labeling Requirements and Implications for Foods Marketed in the U.S.

Food labeling requirements in the U.S. are complex, and you need to stay ahead of the curve as they continue to be redefined. This course will provide you with the foundational and practical knowledge you need to comply with new and established labeling laws and regulations. Instructors will also cover emerging issues in regulation and labeling to help regulation professionals and product developers reformulate and react to marketplace drivers such as clean/clear labeling, corporate social responsibility, and responsible sourcing they need to understand the regulatory implications.

Special note: If you plan on attending any short course (July 15-16) and IFT FIRST (July 16-19), please register here. If you wish to only register for a short course, please click the 'Register' button on this page.

Contact
Maya Salazar
msalazar@ift.org