< Previouswww.fdiforum.net NPD & INGREDIENTS 20 ingredient that is derived from food sources that comes with extra health benefits. Harnessing these benefits and developing products that can cater to specific illnesses is leading to the burgeoning pharma foods market. Gluten-free foods can enable sufferers of celiac disease to enjoy foods they would otherwise be unable to, while speciality sweets allow diabetes sufferers to enjoy a treat without causing a spike in their blood sugar levels. Imagine then, a food product can help to medicate and maintain a disease like diabetes. Big food companies are already investing millions of dollars in research and development in this very field, making a fringe idea very much a reality. Already, there is a convergence between big pharma and food, with many of the top food brands actively engaging in the sciences. Brands like Nestlé have scientific divisions on top of their R&D departments. The reality is that the future of food is intrinsically tied to health and lifestyle, and rather than contributing towards illnesses, our food choices can help to cure and maintain it. But these products don’t come without their own unique set of challenges. Gluten- free products, for example, pose an ingredient challenge because they require substitute binders or thickeners, such as Xanthan gum. This gum is used to trap air to make batters light and fluffy, but it is difficult to uniformly disperse. Today, countless new ingredients and formulations are constantly being introduced. Whether adding new flavours or proteins or attempting to make recipes healthier or lower in calories, the industry is constantly evolving. This is often not a challenge to mixing technology, but a test of applications experience. Process challenges arise when attempting to disperse the variety of ingredients (including gums, gelatins, CMC, pectins, etc.) used to make smooth, thick fillings, coatings and glazes. Turning towards the latest trends in the food industry gives some indication to what we’ll be eating in the future. Functional ingredients are prescient, and the current exploration of natural sweeteners, fortified ingredients and every more innovative machinery to better disperse and incorporate natural thickeners and texturisers will come to define our plates in the decades to come. © Shutterstock / Alexander Raths 18-21.qxp_Layout 1 29/07/2020 08:59 Page 3www.fdiforum.net 21 FROM PIONEERS. FOR PIONEERS. Jennewein Biotechnologie was founded in 2005 with the vision to develop new production processes for complex oligosaccharides. In 2015, to the market. in this process. Jennewein Biotechnologie is the pioneer and inventor of a unique fermentation process for the production of HMOs identical to those present in human breast milk. 1 * not from human milk 1 Bode L (2012) Human milk oligosaccharides: Every baby needs a sugar mama. Glycobiology 22, 1147-1162. jennewein-biotech.de NATURAL FOOD INGREDIENTS www.kanegrade.com Tel: +44 (0) 1438 742242 Email: info@kanegrade.com Kanegrade_Advert_185mm W x 120mm H.indd 113/11/2019 11:10 18-21.qxp_Layout 1 29/07/2020 08:59 Page 4www.fdiforum.net SUPPLY CHAIN 22 Consumer demand means the supply chain must move more efficiently than ever before to ensure food and beverage products, ingredients and produce are as fresh as possible. That would be fairly simple to operate, without the seemingly contradictory requirement to also ensure the supply chain is safe and secure, so customers can be ensured of the very highest standards. New principles in supply chain management are making a major impact on efficiency. The latest routing and scheduling software, for instance, helps supply chain managers discover how each low carbon technology will work in different scenarios. While many companies are looking at introducing biofuel, this can be complicated by the added difficulties in acquiring it. New software can calculate how many extra miles will be added to trips for refuelling with biofuel, with the additional mileage set against the required reductions in emissions. This can therefore give an explicit and valuable factor to assist companies in reviewing their carbon emissions – now often a prerequisite – and allow them to formulate effective ideas Driving efficiency An upsurge in consumer demand is placing unprecedented strain on supply chains, with logistics operators forced to step up. However, there are a number of solutions to usher in greater levels of efficiency. 22-25.qxp_Layout 1 29/07/2020 09:00 Page 1www.fdiforum.net SUPPLY CHAIN 23 © Shutterstock / Aun Photographer that best suit their operations. With the issues of cost and efficiency under the spotlight like never before, multimodal solutions are becoming more and more attractive to supply chain managers. It’s certainly the case that many companies aren’t following routes that could be more effective – for example, while sixty-three per cent of containers arrive in the UK through ports in the South East of England, only ten per cent of large distribution warehousing is actually based there. The vast majority of the items, therefore, have to travel across the country in trucks that will inevitably ramp up carbon emission. The introduction of more warehousing in the right areas will make a difference, as too will the co-operative logistics schemes whereby numerous companies can work together to full up one lorry with a number of products rather than have dozens travel around half-empty. It’s not just the vehicles on the road that have an environmental impact either – those confined to the warehouse play an equally important role. 24 Á 22-25.qxp_Layout 1 29/07/2020 09:00 Page 2www.fdiforum.net SUPPLY CHAIN 24 The new breed of warehouse management and distribution tools are, however, ensuring complete traceability throughout the entire process. Each item can be monitored, traced and accounted for at every step of the way – and records of all these transactions can be easily made available, which is now often required by retailers in any case, as well as customs and excise. In an industry where supermarkets are demanding a determining point of origin or batch numbers for any recalls with twenty-four hours, it’s obviously of paramount importance that the traceability systems don’t falter upon reaching the supply chain. Due to the high-profile nature of many large retailers, both in terms of the media and public opinion, retailers are very quick to drop suppliers who show failures or delays in terms of tracing back problems, so having a good system in place can help prevent loss of major contracts. Despite this, there are still businesses that are working at a rather slower speed and a recent survey of 250 companies suggested that twenty-six per cent of those surveyed wouldn’t be able to identify product recall items within four hours, while eleven per cent would need at least a day and ten per cent wouldn’t be able to carry out those requirements at all. Those companies would therefore have little chance when it came to winning major blue chip contracts. Of course, materials handling remains a major factor in the supply chain, with the human element predictably being the one with the greatest potential for loss of 22-25.qxp_Layout 1 29/07/2020 09:00 Page 3www.fdiforum.net SUPPLY CHAIN 25 © Shutterstock / Halfpoint efficiency. Forklifts, for instance, are commonly used across the materials handling industry, with almost every warehouse or distribution centre in the country operating in a few at least. What can cause confusion, however, is the wide array of forklifts available on the market, and what roles they might best be suitable towards. Almost all forklifts will come with health and safety precautions such as shielded roofs as standard, but there might also need to be considerations in terms of user accessibility, or even ergonomics. While many may scoff at the idea that ergonomic design should warrant a more expensive forklift system, one should remember that in an average day, an operator might move there arm over a thousand times an hour, and their head twice that number. Dragging that out over an eight-hour day is going to cause serious strain and fatigue on workers. While this might not lead to injury, it will certainly have an impact on efficiency levels, as workers begin to pause to loosen muscles or take quick rests – all of which can damage efficiency, and yet can be easily avoided. In many cases, the improvements that can be made to the supply chain to increase efficiency are neither overly expensive or esoteric, but are simply ones that operators have taken for granted. What is for sure, however, is that with the increasing demands being placed on manufacturers, both by retailers and the general public. The supply chain is going to be facing some serious challenges in the coming years and will remain an important part of the food and drink industry. 22-25.qxp_Layout 1 29/07/2020 09:00 Page 4www.fdiforum.net TEMPERATURE CONTROL 26 Keeping cool Temperature controlled storage and distribution remains one of the most powerful industries across the supply chain, with the cold chain accounting for roughly nine per cent of the £187 billion of sales in the food and drink sector. As such, there are several operational challenges to mitigate. 26-29.qxp_Layout 1 29/07/2020 09:02 Page 1www.fdiforum.net TEMPERATURE CONTROL 27 When it comes to distribution centres, which play a key role in the supply chain towards the retail market, the costs of temperature control systems can quickly scale out of control. Therefore, it’s important at all times to focus on methods of efficiently maintaining temperature levels, with as little ambient loss of temperature as possible. At the end of the day, it’s far more expensive to keep air cool, then it is to warm up. Doors and loading bays create an immediate but necessary breach in a warehouse’s defences, allowing the cooler air inside to escape via convection currents. What’s more, this is an inescapable consequence, as the ultimate goal of these facilities is to store and ship out goods as quickly as possible to their final destination. As such, while it might result in energy savings to install a number of doors between the cold storage facility and the loading bays, this only slows down the productivity of the workers within, and how soon they can have the stock shipped out. Ultimately, it becomes a difficult balance between energy savings and throughput. The final focus must always be on the efficiency of a distribution centre at its central goal – the storage and distribution 28 Á 26-29.qxp_Layout 1 29/07/2020 09:02 Page 2www.fdiforum.net TEMPERATURE CONTROL 28 centre of goods. Energy savings must come second to this, though should still be pursued at every opportunity, of course. Air curtains provide a potential solution to this problem, or, at the very least, minimise the loss of heat at loading bays. A cold store air curtain works by creating a curtain of air that cuts through currents, creating a barrier between the external ambient air, and the chilled temperature within a cold store. The greatest benefit of these systems is not just the ability for the air curtain to minimise energy loss through temperature contamination, but also to allow continual access for any workers. There is no door to be opened or closed, and the curtain is safe for workers to travel through as they deliver and remove palletised goods. Not only does this improve general efficiency within the cold store, but it also enables rooms to be kept at varying temperatures – important when a facility might have to cater for a wide range of food products that require different refrigerated temperature levels. Of course, there is more to efficiently running a temperature-controlled storage facility then plugging up the entrances. Managing stock within the distribution centre can become increasingly more complex, as the temperatures are kept lower. For instance, machinery and systems that rely on battery power can come under risk, as continued exposure to the cold has a negative impact on batteries – typically resulting in fifty per cent degradation to battery life. This can become a larger concern with the move towards electric lift trucks and fork-lifts, which can see vehicles running out of power at inopportune moments. When it comes to workers within these facilities, there is also a host of new concerns and problems to be aware of, many of which will require some remedial training for companies moving employees to cold store facilities. In the above example of electric vehicles, staff need to be made aware that a vehicle which is marked down as having an eight-hour battery life might struggled to manage more than four or five. Changing the labelling on these vehicles can go a long way to preventing problems, alternatively investing in batteries with larger voltages can help minimise the problems. The goal with temperature control in the warehousing industry is almost always to prevent leakage of controlled temperature, while also adopting the workforce and equipment to work within the changed conditions. But what about the transport side of things, which is naturally the biggest chink in the temperature- 26-29.qxp_Layout 1 29/07/2020 09:02 Page 3www.fdiforum.net TEMPERATURE CONTROL 29 For the food & drink industry thermometer.co.uk Cooking • Reheating • Refrigeration • Oven • Grill Helping your business be HACCP compliant Designed & built in the UK, we offer a wide monitoring to Bluetooth® & rem ote WiFi logging FOOD CHECK controlled armour. Refrigerated vans and lorries have been common sights for many years, yet they’ve rarely been able to match up to the safety and control of a dedicated storage facility itself. Simply put, the technology has not been in place to bring the same kind of safeguards a warehouse has, into a vehicle. But that’s not to say companies aren’t innovating in this direction, with some interesting results and implications for the future. © Shutterstock / Sor n340 Studio Images 26-29.qxp_Layout 1 29/07/2020 09:02 Page 4Next >