Food Process Engineering

INGREDIENT DEVELOPMENT AND FORMULATION

The Food Process Engineering (FPE) team facilitates food product and prototype development from bench-top to pilot scale in a wide range of food categories. Housing a variety of state-of-the-art food processing equipment, in addition to high pressure processing, the group’s work complements the vision and mission of SIFBI. The group’s comprehensive technology platform enables start-ups, SMEs, and MNCs to collaborate closely with in-house expertise that includes food technology, development of novel and alternative ingredients, food-safe ingredient microencapsulation, sensory science, bioprocessing, quality evaluation, and engineering, in order to develop and launch market-ready high-value foods and ingredients.

FOOD AND INGREDIENT TEXTURISATION

Future food formats often require novel methods of texturisation to achieve sensory attributes that appeal to consumers. With plenty of expertise in processing technologies, the FPE team studies how advanced processing affects the composition and microstructure of multi-component food matrices, and develops technologies to texturise new alternative protein ingredients from a wide range of natural origins including plants, fermented foods, and cultivated cells, as a sustainable alternative to animal-based foods. As the group works towards tailoring technofunctional properties of protein, lipid, and carbohydrate blended ingredients for diverse food applications, scaffold-based texturisation of meat analogues is also harnessed to fabricate muscle-like structures for whole-cut product formats.