Improving the Shelf Life Stability of the Food Powder

The food industry is moving towards producing more natural and healthy products. Ensuring the shelf-life and stability of products is a critical responsibility for food industries, not only for quality and safety reason, but also to fulfil consumers trust and preference. Product shelf life are generally driven by three key elements: the product properties (e.g. materials science driving stability), packaging barrier capacity (e.g. moisture permeability), and environmental conditions (temperature and relative humidity during transport and storage). By considering these three elements, it is possible to have more control on the shelf life of the material and reduce the environmental impact on the product.

The aim of this project is to focus on improving the product properties, and more specifically to make a link between material science (e.g. state diagrams, apparent moisture diffusion), powders’ composition and structure, and physical stability (e.g. kinetics of stickiness and caking). This will be carried out by choosing industrial relevant process to produce powder prototypes with improved composition. Then establish correlations between powder composition / structure and kinetics of moisture sorption and develop a model to predict shelf-life stability.

The student will work within the Particle Products Research Group at University of Sheffield which is equipped with cutting edge research equipment for powder product characterisation and development. The work shall be carried out in close collaboration with the Nestlé Research in Lausanne, Switzerland.