Technical Conference Addresses Grain Storage, Handling and Processing Advances

Jan. 13, 2011 - PRLog -- Mr. Hans-Christoph Erling, President of the German Millers Association (Verband Deutscher Mühlen) will welcome delegates to the first GRAPAS Conference to be held in Europe. This international meeting, which will be held May 5, 2011 alongside Victam 2011, in Cologne, Germany, will bring together expert industry speakers to address technical issues affecting the post-harvest grain chain, from storage and handling to processing.

Key note presentation
Dr. Jan Willem van der Kamp has been announced as the keynote speaker at GRAPAS 2011. Dr. van der Kamp will update delegates on the results of HEALTHGRAIN, a €17 million EU funded integrated project, which ran for five years and was completed in 2010.
HEALTHGRAIN “Exploiting Bioactivity of Cereal Grains for Improved Nutrition” united 44 research partners and covered breeding, technology, nutrition and consumer research. It has provided new insights and tools for increasing the average European citizen's intake of whole grain products and its protective components.
Studies on 200 varieties of wheat and other cereal grains showed a 2 - 10-fold variation in levels. Both high and low levels of dietary fiber and other health-protective compounds were found in high yielding varieties: breeding tools were developed for modulating fiber levels and the amylase : amylopectin ratio; milling technology systems were developed for altering the levels of protective compounds in flour and bran in order to match preferred nutritional profiles; the xylanase enzyme toolbox offers possibilities for altering the ratios of insoluble, soluble, and low molecular prebiotic fiber.
Nutrition studies supported the known health benefits of products rich in whole grain and showed a favorable impact of these products on body composition (less fat tissue) and of aleurone rich products for protection for inflammation and for reduced risks for heart diseases.
The HEALTHGRAIN Forum association, with more than 45 members of industry and academia, is now pursuing the aims of the project.

Dr. van der Kamp is well known to both the food and feed grain industries: as a board member and president of the International Association for Cereal Science and Technology (ICC) he contributed to conferences all over the world as an invited speaker; as director of Cereal and Animal Nutrition Research at TNO, the Netherlands, he has participated in and managed major international projects, including the Eureka project IMPROFEED, and the European projects MoniQA (Quality Assurance in the food chain) and HEALTHGRAIN

Grain Handling and Storage
Oswin Verkerk, Project Manager, Tebodin CCE, the Nethrlands, will present the key elements that are vital to reach an optimal design and process solution for grain handling and storage. Issues like safety, sustainability, environment, operational costs and flexibility are just as important as issues such as capacity, investment costs, product requirements, tracking and tracing and hygiene, he will say.

Peer Hansen, Crop-Protector KS., Denmark will describe a new comprehensive way to manage and organize all operational tasks associated with stored grain management; taking into account such issues as storage strategies, inventory issues, monitoring of the total crop value and shrinkage minimization. It has as one of its key elements an efficient monitoring of conditional parameters (temperature, moisture, etc.); and it also includes legislative issues and possibilities for interfacing with external data bases of various kinds.

Christian Lückstädt, R&D Manager, Addcon, Germany will present the case for buffered propionic acid combined with sodium benzoate as a preservative for wet grain and corn storage, even without prior drying, as an interesting option for long term storage that secures the quality of the stored raw material. European case studies on wheat, barley and corn storage will be discussed.

Quality control
Dr. Giovanni Campolongo, Büchi Laboretechnik AG , Italy will present a case study of the wide ranging use of Near Infrared (NIR) Spectroscopy in one of Italy’s largest bakery companies. Since 2005, Barilla Group has projected, developed and tested different analytical methods based on NIR, using its in-house R&D assets and working in partnership with research centers and technical. Working with a network of FT-NIR Spectrometers, NIR applications have been developed to perform quality control of raw materials such as soft wheat and other bakery ingredients. Other applications have been developed for quality control of finished products like industrial bread, cakes and cookies.  
Quantitative analysis quality control parameters apply to nutritional values (moisture, fat, protein), to the assessment of different types of carbohydrates or the measurement of ethanol used as shelf-life stabilizer and flavor-carrier. In terms of identification analysis, the potential to discriminate by spectra comparison between standard samples and other samples not compliant with these standards has been studied.    

Trends in grain milling
Changes throughout the entire grain value chain will impact flour millers in the near future and beyond.  Urs Duebendorfer, Product Manager, Buhler, Switzerland
will present the current trends in the grain milling industry to ensure food safety and hygiene. This will include the changes in raw materials, food production, processing of grain and the demand from customers in total. How changing requirements in the grain processing industry translate into a demand for specific technical requirements, such as cleaning and grinding technology will also be explained.

The process industries’ major challenge today is to expand sustainability while achieving enhanced food security and economic development for the global population as a whole, Gilles Maller, Vice President Development of Technologies, Clextral, France will tell delegates. How twin screw extrusion technology offers definite advantages for this in various sectors of the food and feed industry will be discussed.

Presentations will also be made by Italy’s flour milling engineer, Ocrim, and by Patrick  Clark, Amandus Kahl, USA who will discuss improved feed hygiene and animal performance by means of structural grinding and expander use.

Registration
Online registration is underway and required to ensure a place at this conference. For more information and to register, please visit the conference website: www.feedconferences.com.

GRAPAS 2011 is organized by Linx Conferences, Kailua, Hawaii, in cooperation with Victam International, Nijkerk, the Netherlands and is sponsored by Buhler, Uzwil, Switzerland.

# # #

Based in Hawai'i, Linx Conferences specializes in conferences for the aquafeed, animal feed and grain industries worldwide. Linx conferences is a division of Aquafeed, the specialist information provider for the aquafeed industries, on the web at http://www.aquafeed.com.