Ashim K. Datta Biological and Environmental Engineering Food manufacturing: improving quality and safety by combining data-driven with mechanistic understanding Ashim K. Datta Biological and Environmental Engineering

Food Manufacturing  Improve quality  Improve safety  Novel product/process  Reduce waste/ Sustainability  Reduce cost Food manufacturing encompasses procurement, processing, distribution, storage and consumption. Primary goals are to improve quality and safety, develop new products while reducing waste and cost.

Complex systems approach combining data-driven with mechanistic understanding Composition and Structure Raw material properties Processed material properties Changes during packaging and distribution Energy use databases Waste generated databases Food con-sumption databases Mechanistic Knowledge-base Of property- composition Mechanistic process models Important stages of food manufacturing that can be integrated in a complex systems approach; Data and knowledge bases (circles) are at various stages of availability. The current USDA composition database has 200,000+ foods Physical properties are many and the relationships between the properties and composition/structure are also complex and numerous. Processing methods are many that transforms the food material in a very complex manner for which significant mechanistic understanding exists. Because of many processing possibilities, processed material properties of importance to the consumer, i.e., quality (texture, color, sensory) and safety (microbiological and chemical) can have very large possibilities. My career has been to try to build mechanistic/engineering models that describe the changes that a food undergoes. It is a system level approach that can bring in a lot of the details but it is at the individual food product scale. Energy use and waste generated are also of critical interests that depend on the processing conditions—large databases already exist on these Using complex systems approaches that combine data-driven with mechanistic models and couple various scales, sensitivity of the ingredients and processing methods on food quality, energy use, environmental footprint, and microbiological and chemical risk on the population can be seen at the individual industry level or at the population level. While I work at this scale, I want to build in a way they can be linked into the larger systems level approach that would help decision making in industry and by public planners toward risk management, efficiency and sustainability. Food composition databases Thermo-physical property databases Food safety databases Food risk databases Life cycle analysis databases

usda nifa funded project on “computer-aided food manufacturing for everyone” Properties Knowledge Base for most foods Thermophysical Electromagnetic Colloidal, Texture High pressure Fruits/veg storage Process Apps for complete process sim of most used processes Drying Frying Baking Sterilization Shelf-life Visualization lib for most complex processes Microwave drying High pressure processing UV processing I am happy to say a decent size grant has been funded where a team of us from several universities will be working with a number of food industries in building three tools— 1) a property predictor that provides the properties needed for a particular type of processing by doing all the calculations in the background. 2) Process simulations apps that provide what-if scenarios in product and process development 3) Scientific visualization of complex food processes