Robot noses, new water, cooking on long-wave radio

Improve uncovers the Tomorrow’s World of the Future Food Factory

New research by Improve, the skills council for the UK food and drink manufacturing sector, has highlighted the emerging technologies set to change the face of UK food manufacturing and processing – and the workforce skills needed to operate them.

Among the 42 leading edge technologies the study believes could become commonplace are:

• Sensor arrays capable of detecting vapour emissions associated with off flavours and harmful bacteria

• Neutral Electrolysed Water (NEW) which can remove salad surface contamination by generating small amounts of bactericidal chlorine

• Radio Frequency Heating which penetrates larger items of food better than microwaves

• Machines with the same colour recognition capability as humans and are able to assess, for example, salmon quality by colour.

The Improve research study reviewed available international literature on emerging, experimental and future production line innovation likely to be in use by 2025 and beyond.

The resulting report, International Literature Review of Technological Innovation Relating to Food and Drink Manufacturing and Processing, available from the Improve website www.improveltd.co.uk highlights the potential step changes available to businesses in production line efficiency and the changing skill sets that food and drink workforces will need to adopt.

“The implications of these new technologies are particularly relevant to the skills sets of factory operatives, maintenance engineers, process and engineering designers and food scientists,” said Sukky Jassi, Improve’s head of research and sector insight.

“Its also important that anyone involved in new product development understands the potential of new technology in terms of producing products with very different characteristics to those we see on today’s supermarket shelves.”

The report splits technologies into those commercially available today, those likely to emerge in the next five years, technology which could be prototyped by 2020, systems predicted to be at experimental stage by 2025 and likely longer term innovations.

Among the science fiction to science fact technologies which could be developed for commercial use toward the middle of the century are:

• Spinning disc reactors capable of heating liquids to precise temperatures for short time periods,

• Laser-based photon refrigeration,

• Refrigeration based on vapour compression in a stream of water

           and

• A “wobbling reactor” which uses a baffle-filled tube to create a low-shear mixing environment for shear-sensitive food materials such as yoghurt.