Agricultural and Forestry Science

In recent years, new food packaging concepts have been developed to respond on consumption trends towards mildly preserved, fresh convenient food products. Fresh-cut vegetables are an example of fresh-like, healthy convenience foods, developed in the ‘80s in the UK. Their market is yearly increasing with 25% in West Europe.

Packaging fresh-cut vegetables under an Equilibrium Modified Atmosphere (EMA) is one of the new applied food packaging technologies offering a prolonged shelf-life of re

Fruit’s hidden colour reveals whether it will ripen.

Some green tomatoes have a rosy future; others do not. A sensor that picks up subtle differences in the light the fruits reflect could sort future salads from greens.

Many tomatoes are picked green and bathed in ripening gas ethylene. Fruit picked too early will never ripen. Discerning consumers avoid them and growers lose out.

A scanner that analyses the wavelengths green tomatoes bounce back can predict th

Food quality will fall, food costs will rise and stored food will be damaged. Historical relics may be lost to insect attack, rodent and insect infestations on public transport will swell, and fungal contamination of stored food will increase. According to a recent meeting of the Society of Chemical Industry (SCI) Pest Management Group, these may be the consequences of a worldwide phasing out of the crop protectant methyl bromide (MB).

The SCI Pest Management Group invited acclaimed speaker

These days our supermarket shelves are filled with more and more so-called “functional foods” foods with special health-promoting properties. These products often represent a “high-tech” product line, in the twilight zone between food and medicine. Agricultural researcher Cecilia Mark-Herbert from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, SLU, has now studied the market for these products. Her doctoral dissertation shows that developing these foods requires not only new products, but also new

Common or garden straw could be a rich source of raw materials for a range of industries, from the health foods and cosmetics sectors to packaging and fabrics.
Researchers at the University of Wales, Bangor are developing environmentally friendly ways of processing wheat and other cereal straws to extract valuable products for industry.

The work is being carried out through the Government’s LINK scheme, with funding from the Swindon based Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Coun

Researchers at Plant Research International in the Netherlands have achieved a breakthrough in the development of chrysanthemums with resistance to thrips, bringing the ecological cultivation of chrysanthemums a step closer. This is the conclusion of the thesis with which Seetharam Annadana, a Plant Research International guest member of staff from India, recently obtained his doctorate at Wageningen University. Annadana developed new techniques which make possible the genetic modification of two th