Grant: Applied Research Tools and Instruments Grants

Recent history has demonstrated that consumers in North America and Europe have become increasing awareof the benefits of healthy eating. The demand for healthy, convenient foods and beverages has steadily risenover the past several years, doubling the number of product launches, year over year. Functional dairy,vegetable and fruit, sports drinks and energy drinks have all seen impressive growth with no sign of slowdown. The possibilities of functional beverages are endless, ranging from fortification with prebiotics, to theuse of by-products and functional ingredients, and use of novel technologies like nanoemulsions. AtlanticCanadian companies are aware of these trends and are keen to collaborate in functional beverage research.Canada's Smartest Kitchen (CSK), the food product research and development center (and NSERC TechnologyAccess Center), co-located with The Culinary Institute of Canada at Holland College in Prince Edward Islandhas been working increasingly with SMEs to develop innovative, value added beverages. Of the 1,400 food andbeverage products developed in its existence, 40 have been fortified beverages and emulsified sauces. To date,CSK has been restricted only to concept validation of these beverages and sauces based on lack of capacity inhomogenization, the process of mixing two non-soluble liquids uniformly.To better serve industry and train students, CSK is requesting a PandaPLUS 2000 bench scale two-phasehomogenizer. This equipment will allow CSK to move beyond concept validation and into full productdevelopment. The PandaPLUS 2000 has been selected based on direct scalability to pilot and industrial sizedprocessing, allowing for seamless bench-to-facility product development. CSK has identified a significant gapin training and industry access to this bench scale capability and is hoping to fill this void.