Food Process Intensification

Have you ever made stewed tomatos? This morning while I watched my pot of watery tomato juice simmer down to a thick sauce, I truly realized just how beneficial membrane reactors must be to the likes of the food industry. If you can imagine the costs involved in boiling gallons of tomato juice into cans of stewed tomatoes or sauce, think of the money and energy to be saved by some sort of filtration or other membrane technology that could remove excess water from the brew, in just a matter of minutes.

Currently, tomatoes are stewed in large kettles and tomato paste is made using a combination of heat and vacuum. To my knowledge, membrane technology is not applied yet in this industry. However, in the meantime, agricultural biotechnology research has been successful in the development of tomato cultivars with lower water contents, specifically geared towards taking less time to process during canning.

What to do with skins and other solid waste is also an ongoing concern in the food industry. An ideal form of process intensification would be to marry the processing of waste to the production of energy that can be re-routed back into the food processing cycle, and this has been attempted for the tomato processing industry. Unfortunately, in many cases, the overall savings in cost and energy aren't always significant enough to be worth the effort. This is definitely an area full of opportunities as we focus more on "green" biotech research in the future.

_Sources:

Hills, D. and Dykstra, R. 1980. Anaerobic digestion of cannery tomato solid waste. J. Environ. Eng. Division, ASCE Publishers, 106(2):257-266.