ESA Snack Production Course Part I

Part I of these courses will take place online via ZOOM. There will be 2 sessions every day. On Tuesday, 10 November, our Managing Director Stefan Töpfl will speak about innovations of the chips production process by the application of Pulsed Electric Fields (PEF) and its potential for new product developments.

Potato chips are one of the most consumed snack products in the world. This is the reason why emerging technologies, such as PEF, are slowly becoming a standard in the potato chips processing industry. Due to the application of PEF, the cell membranes of the potato are perforated allowing for enhanced mass transfer, resulting in a variety of processing and quality benefits for the final product. However, in recent years new products such as vegetable chips have seen increased demand by the consumers. Currently, it is still complicated to produce a high quality, profitable vegetable chip, due to the hard to handle texture of the raw material and the lack of knowledge of raw material composition and storage conditions. Here, PEF can help to improve the processing of those raw materials as well as streamline the raw material quality. Due to the formation of pores in the cell membrane the vegetables become softer and more flexible, allowing for innovative cuts without big cutting losses. Additionally, PEF enables an adaption of the frying conditions resulting in a more appealing final product. To achieve this, however, it is important to be able to apply the correct amount of energy for each individual product. Therefore, new methods have been developed to measure the impact of the PEF treatment on different raw materials but also varieties within one product family.