The road to a new ingredient

Posted by Andrew Wadge on August 8th 2007 in Science, safety and health

With the summer holidays upon us, a new food ingredient designed to improve the texture and taste of lower fat ice creams has been given initial approval by one of our independent committees of scientists.
 
Many food companies are looking to reduce the fat and sugar in their products, but taking these ingredients out of a product like ice cream makes it difficult to get the feel of this treat right. So Unilever applied to use ice structuring proteins in making ice cream to help make the very small crystals consistent with that creamy feel.

Ice structuring proteins are naturally occurring proteins and peptides, which are found in a variety of living organisms (such as fish, plants and insects). These proteins provide protection against tissue damage in very cold conditions by lowering the temperature at which ice crystals grow and by changing the size and shape of the ice crystals.

But getting these proteins from fish and so on is not feasible, and so the company developed a strain of yeast that had been genetically modified to produce the same proteins in fermentation tanks.

The initial approval does not mean that the new ingredient will appear on our shelves immediately, as novel foods go through a lengthy process before they are approved or rejected. Indeed, our report on this one will now go to other European Union food safety authorities for comment and any final decision.

Any new food product that a company wants to sell in the European Union must be rigorously assessed for safety. In the UK the assessment is an open and consultative process undertaken by the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes (ACNFP), an independent committee of scientists appointed by the Food Standards Agency. Novel foods are any foods that do not have a significant history of being eaten within the EU before May 1997.

This application was first announced on our websites a year ago and since then the committee has scrutinised it for safety, including whether people are likely to be allergic to it, the toxicity testing done on it and how it should be labelled. You can look at the committee’s website to see how this progressed and at what other new foods and processes are being looked at by the ACNFP.

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I have idly wondered about

Posted by Anonymous (not verified) on 24/08/2007 - 13:09

I have wondered in the past about the battle that must rage between commercial confidentiality requirements and assessing material for safety. I am not commenting specifically on ISPs, but given that corporate research divisions often do not publish their research findings for very good commercial reasons, how does the FSA assess an additive for safety if the information is not in the public domain? There must be a lag between the release of information to the greater scientific community (along the lines of 'look at the exciting properties of this additive!') and independent studies assessing safety and function. I am not ascribing any nefarious designs to Business – after all, damaging the customers is generally frowned upon – but what do the regulatory bodies base their decisions on? Or is this where commissioned research comes in, should it prove necessary or desirable?