Welcoming over 100 participants, the 55th meeting of the IVLV chocolate technology working group in Freising was again very well attended. Experts from research and business highlighted numerous topics in their varied and interesting lectures about chocolate - from allergens and fat bloom to the kinetics of FFA cocoa butter blends.
By Alfons Strohmaier
The primary mission of the Industry Association for Food Technology and Packaging (IVLV) is to promote research into food, plant products and packaging technology. How consistently and collectively these tasks are being tackled by science and industry has been exemplified for many years by the Chocolate Technology Working Group. ”The WG Chocolate Technology is by far the gold standard of the IVLV,” emphasized Dr Peter Eisner, Deputy Head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV, in his welcoming speech to the group‘s 55th meeting in Freising. With more than 100 participants, the event was booked out to the last seat, although the organizers switched to an external hall like the year prior. Again, almost the entire chocolate industry was present to listen to the exciting first-hand lectures by research institutes and industry, from global corporations to international SMEs.
Under the scientific direction of Isabell Rothkopf from Fraunhofer IVV, Oliver Stricker from August Storck KG, the chairman of the working group, and his deputy, Dr Marc Lutz, skillfully moderated the two-day conference, which offered a broad range of topics covering allergenicity, hazelnuts in chocolate, fat bloom, reformulation and crystallization.
In addition to the ”inexhaustible topic" (according to Dr Eisner) of fat bloom, the lectures on allergenicity, measurement technologies and sensors as well as multi-sensory perception and networking for data-driven chocolate production marked this year's meeting. Dr Ulrich Busch from the Bavarian State Office for Health and Food Safety elaborated on how difficult the problem of allergens remains despite clear legal require-ments, including unintended cross-contamination. While 14 allergenic substances are currently defined in Europe, either highlighted in the list of ingredients or marked with the warning “May contain traces of …”, other regulations apply worldwide.
In light of this, allergen management is indispensable for companies, emphasized Dr Busch and Guido Reineke from Storck, who outlined the challenges of chocolate production for the European and non-European markets. Promising projects related to this topic were presented by Christa Schuster-Salas, who founded her own “Infopoint Kakao und mehr” company, and Isabell Rothkopf. Former Ritter Sport manager Schuster-Salas reported on the state of development of a project entitled “A Building Block for the Reduction of Unwanted Trace Entries.” In a first step, the project examines the properties of possible ingredients in liquid and powder form and their effects on, e. g., surface, flow properties, dispersity, solution or viscosity. An extremely exciting research project funded by the IVLV since the beginning of the year is “Ice Pigging” as a potentially revolutionary cleaning technique for the chocolate industry. Instead of using mechanical pigs, this innovative method of cleaning pumps a coarse ice water mixture through the pipelines. As water is not an option in the chocolate sector, Fraunhofer IVV is now experimenting with a coarse mixture consisting of an ice-cold chocolate ball and/or chopped choco-late as a “pig” and cocoa butter for the liquid phase. The result of the project, which runs until the end of 2019 and is supported by Sollich, WDS and Netzsch, could be a CIP demonstrator validated for industrial use, as Isabell Rothkopf described.
The scientist Rothkopf appeared on the podium with a lecture on “Fat Bloom Development on Chocolates with Whole Hazelnuts.” She also reported on a rapid test for fat bloom prediction for pralines as well as a completed IVLV project with interlaboratory tests to determine the crystallization tendency of cocoa butter and masses. Due to staff shortages caused by parental leave at the Fraunhofer IVV, Dr Gottfried Ziegleder, who has worked for the Fraunhofer IVV since 1977, is responsible for short-term projects. In the usual manner, the grand seigneur of fat bloom research inspired the audience with his lectures “Contact Intensity – A New Approach to Fat Bloom Research” (together with Isabell Rothkopf) and “Cocoa Butter – Crystallization and Chemistry.” Ziegleder made the audience sit up and take notice with a new approach to analyse the triacylglycerides POP, POS and SOS in cocoa butter of various origins. In combination with the Cacao Atlas 2002, it turns out that cocoa butter from Papua New Guinea provides the best conditions against fat bloom.
Further illuminating contributions were made by Torsten Tybussek from the Fraunhofer IVV with the topic ”Food Scanner – Quality Determination in Real Time,” and Dr Daniel
Sellin from the IRPC Infrared Process Control GmbH with a report on the MIR sensor for measuring foreign oil in coating systems. The company has been active in the food and beverage industry for 25 years. For five years, it has been working intensively in the area of mid-infrared sensor techno- logy with a focus on application-specific sensor technology. The detection of filling fats can be integrated online into the process, whereby measurable parameters such as filling fat content, fat content, milk fat content proportions of saturated and unsaturated fatty acids, and proportions of palmitic-, stearic-, oleic- and linoleic acids are available “at the touch of a button,” reported Sellin.
Irene Buchmann (Fraunhofer IVV) talked about the “Reduction of Saturated Fats in Chocolate Fillings” and Miriam Müller from the University of Trier on "FFAs & Co – Influence on the Crystallization of Cocoa Butter and CBE.” Both were very interesting topics and will appear here in further reports. For companies, the reduction of sugar and fat has become an enormously important topic. In this regard, Prof. Dr Jessica Freiherr from the Fraunhofer IVV revealed studies on “Multisensory Perception” which suggest that the olfactory process may be used for new formulations.
