• Objectives
• Innovations

innovations

Safety And Quality Of Food
The focus of that priority is the creation of an ongoing national forum for technical dialogue to facilitate closer co-operative working relationships between both domestic and international Food Manufacturers, Foodservices Operations, Retail Food Operations and any organization or company which is packaging, handling or transporting food products. The Centre will provide a leadership forum "The Food Safety Program" for a broad and diverse representation of the food SMEs to disseminate information on the new standards of safety food, particularly ISO 9000 and HACCP i.e. Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points. These Quality Management Systems will give Polish rural SMEs a general framework to establish a modern quality management system into meat, seafood and poultry plants, grocery stores, restaurants, and other food processing and handling facilities. Key issues such as developing a food safety culture, working with vendors and store design will be highlighted.

Principles of microbiology applied to cleaning, cleaning chemistry, good practices in manufacturing, and HACCP principles will be explained in a simple manner. Besides the technical information, this activity is designed to improve communication between UE and Polish Universities and rural SMEs in cleaning and sanitary practices.

The packaging is a growing sector in the food industry sector. The second topic of the main activity is information on packaging equipment - its application and use, techniques relating to the mechanical packaging of various products, improving line performance, training programs and investigation of all aspects of labeling and decorating technologies as it relates to packaging.

In the field of Control and other Computer Aided Techniques in Agriculture and in Process Engineering, the innovative approach to mathematical modeling is necessary, and very simple software drivers (pre-processors) for users, who are not necessarily familiar with computer techniques. Modeling of processes connected with plants is very difficult because we have to deal with living organisms that actively react on changes in environment. They have usually strong non-stationary and non-linear character. Their dynamics depends not only on the time but also on the position. Traditional method of modeling such objects that utilizes differential equations or correlation models often fails. The staff of our Centre has a considerable experience in modeling and identification of such complex processes. In our projects we have joined methods of identification with traditional models based on physical and chemical lows for a better accuracy. We have utilized our models in the control algorithms and for optimization process parameters in food processing industry.

We plan to co-operate with other European Centres on the new area connected with modeling, control and optimization of freezing and refrigerating processes, water and nutrient relations on crop quality, pest and disease management, horticulture micro-environment control, and others.

In the domain of Novel Measurements Techniques in Agriculture, Horticulture and Food Production: the progress in the information technology and the rapid growing of computation power allows applying a digital image signal as a source of information in agriculture and food processing. Image signal is a rapid and non-invasive scanning method. In many cases it is the only way to estimate parameters like product quality. We have an experience in utilization image texture analyze methods and identifying image features relevant to monitored parameters. We are currently co-operating with groups of European scientists from England, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Holland to organize the European network for the development and use of plant-based electronic sensors in protected horticulture (the bid documents are currently evaluated). We want to extend our research activities on the novel field of non-contact sensors, which have potential to provide more accurate and timely information.

Development of Information Exchange System between Research Centres and Rural Producers

The main goal is to initiate and to help to establish a local permanent information system for farmers and for rural SMEs about goods and services they need and/or offer. Until now there is no such system, neither commercial nor non-commercial.

The main aim of the Development of Permanent Learning and Educational System for Rural Producers activity is to create a system of permanent learning and education for technician and managers from our local SMEs