By Birger Pedersen and Mette Christensen

The Vion Food group has three main reasons for participating in Q-PorkChains:

“First of all Q-PorkChains provides a good network platform for research activities in the different projects. Secondly EU funding facilitates support within commercial organizations for long-term research activities and finally, the pilot modules give us opportunities to link scientific research activities with a long term focus with practical application in practice,” explains Jeroen Reijers.

VION participates in the following Q-PorkChains modules:

Module I – consumer/market analysis, module III – product development, quality, nutrition and convenience, module IV – integration and sustainable management of the production chain and finally in the module A – pilot project.

“The motivation for participation in module III is to gather knowledge by means of participation in scientific projects like Q-PorkChains in cooperation with University Helsinki, University of Copenhagen, IRTA, DMRI and others,” tells Jeroen Reijers.

The objective for VION in this module is an overall reduction of salt (NaCl) and nitrite in meat products, and replacement of NaCl and nitrite by other additives with comparable effects on food safety and shelf life, taste, colour etc. The relevant product categories in this connection are bacon, gammon, kassler, cooked hams, sausages and other processed meat.

“Our motivation for participation in module A – pilot chain water holding capacity – is to translate scientific knowledge into a practical measuring method and device and focus on potential effects on chain management in cooperation with Wageningen University and GIQS.

The objective for VION is sorting for Water-Holding-Capacity by near infra red light (NIR) as a logistical concept. The core activities for us are development of reliable NIR data collection systems on laboratory scale. Furthermore we search for implementation of practical application in the cutting room and finally we hope for development of a logistic model as a decision support tool,” Jeroen Reijers says.