Nominees for the 2009 Dutch Food Valley Award announced

The 2009 Food Valley Award is a prize awarded each year by the Food Valley organization during its annual conference. Each year, the jury looks for the three most innovative initiatives in the food and food-related industry.

01 Sep 2009 --- A healthy margarine for bakery products, a fat replacement and a ‘food jet printer’: these are this year’s most distinctive innovations according to Food Valley’s professional food science and innovation jury. These products from Romi Smilfood, AVEBE and De Grood Innovations have been nominated as candidates for the 2009 Food Valley Award.  The jury found them to be the three best examples of innovation, cooperation and Corporate Social Responsibility. 

Each year, the jury looks for the three most innovative initiatives in the food and food-related industry. Seated on this year’s jury are: R. Rabbinge, University Professor at WUR and Chairman of the Science Council CGIAR (chair), A. Mensink, independent consultant in Life Sciences and Senior Scientific Officer at Food Valley, H. Verhagen, head of RIVM’s Nutrition and Health Centre, H. de Vries, former inspector at VROM, and A. Wassenberg, CEO of Animo Agri Business BV. The winner will be announced at an award ceremony during the Food Valley Conference on October 8 in Ede, The Netherlands.

Healthy bakery margarine
Consumers eat baked goods, cake, biscuits and bakery snacks because they taste so good. But these products are a main source of saturated and trans fats. For the past two years, Heerenveen-based Romi Smilfood, part of the Royal Smilde Food Group and supplier of margarine, oils and fats to the bakery industry, has been developing a range of healthier bakery margarines. The result is Novarin. “Novarin margarine contains barely any trans fat because its formulation is based on non-hydrogenated fats. This makes it possible to reduce the saturated fat content in bakery products by at least 33% without losing functionalities. This even goes for products such as croissants and puff pastry,” says Karin Visser, Industry Product Manager at Romi Smilfood. Novarin can be used in the same ways as regular margarine and the end products are just as tasty, but their fatty acid composition is much healthier.

Digital food decoration printer
The life cycle of edible products is gradually shortening. Food manufacturers must be able to make quick adjustments to keep producing efficiently. The digital printer designed by De Grood Innovations in Nijmegen has a major impact on processing speed. The printer’s print head is suitable for decorating foodstuffs with viscous edible products. “Before, templates had to be set and changed manually. With this new printer, it’s a 100% digital process. This dramatically reduces changeover times when manufacturers have to switch from running one decoration or product to another. The speed of this technique is unparalleled anywhere in the world,” says Pascal de Grood, Managing Director of De Grood Innovations. The closed system prevents mixing with other product ingredients or contamination from the environment. This guarantees the best possible hygiene and food safety.

Natural fat replacement
AVEBE in Veendam introduces ETENIA, a special range of plant-based ingredients that can give products like yoghurt and cake an extra creamy texture. This enables manufacturers to reduce fat content without compromising the products’ sensory characteristics. ETENIA is made of enzymatically modified potato starch. “All in all, we worked on this for seven years. With great pleasure, and in close cooperation with DSM. Other contributors were TNO and NIZO. Producing the enzyme was a big challenge. We were afraid that registering ETENIA as a novel ingredient would be a long and difficult process. But we were pleasantly surprised at how smoothly that went,” says Piet Buwalda, Food Research Manager with AVEBE. Yoghurt, chocolate mousse, croissants, candy and cream cheese; ETENIA is the first starch-based hydrocolloid and it is widely applicable.

Food Valley Conference
The 2009 Food Valley Award is a prize awarded each year by the Food Valley organization during its annual conference. This year the conference will take place on October 8 in CineMec, Ede. The conference will focus on taste.  Speakers include sir Tun Musa Hitam, President of Sime Darby from Malaysia,  sir Gian Luigi Zenti, Director of the Academia Barilla (Barilla Group ,Parma, Italy) and sir Chris Buijink, Secretary General at the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. Each speaker will address the issue of taste and innovation from his own area of expertise. Workshops will offer attendees inspiring new angles on taste.

For more information: www.foodvalley.nl/conference.