Specialty Food Association board member and senior faculty member and research and development director at Oregon State University, Sarah Masoni, uses food science principles daily. She has spent most of her career working with food entrepreneurs, helping them understand everything they need to know about food science and technology.
During her SFA Maker Prep webinar, taking place Wednesday, August 24 at 1 pm EST, Masoni will break down the food science principles that are essential to creating a specialty food business. Sign up for the education session in the Learning Center.
SFA News Daily recently spoke with Masoni.
What food science principles do you feel are most widely applicable to the specialty food industry?
Hurdle technology, the gentle but effective use of a combination of food science, and technologies like temperature, pH, water activity, and/or among 60 other treatments can be readily applied to specialty food. In other words, a combination of preservative effects can be used to minimize microbiological activity in the food product, in turn, extending the shelf life of your product and improving the product quality so that it can last over the desired shelf life of the product.
When working with food entrepreneurs do you see any mistakes that are often made?
Incorporating food science and technology from the standpoint of making the foods that we as makers produce requires daily batch testing of your hurdles, time, temperature, pH, water activity, and brix levels. Mistakes happen when a process is changed and the hurdles are not checked, and when spoilage occurs, creating the potential for making our customers sick. Mistakes also result when we take shortcuts in how we do our clean-up and sanitation, or if we do our shelf-life study with one type of packaging and then change the packaging without redoing the study.
What is one takeaway you hope attendees of your session will implement in their food business?
With the right information and implementation of a little bit of food science and technology, consistent process, and record-keeping, just about anyone can make and sell a food product.
At what stage should entrepreneurs begin consider the food science behind the product?
Entrepreneurs need to start from the very beginning to implement their hurdles, record keeping, food safety implementation, and testing to verify their process. Food Safety needs to be their number one priority, and this necessitates food science
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