For this reason, the Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences at Piacenza’s University Sacro Cuore organized the conference “Food Gases and Applications in the Beverage Sector,” aimed at students in theCourse of Food Technology Processes II “of the Bachelor’s Degree in Food Science and Technology.
The meeting, sponsored and moderated by Professor Roberta Dordoni with the participation of Nicola Fenili, Cryogenic Applications Development and Chemical Processes, and Rhoman Rossi, Marketing project manager, both from the SIAD Group, was an opportunity to give students an extremely current overview of the food gas industry and future developments.
“It was a fruitful and useful discussion between academia and industry,” Rossi emphasized, “with a focus the value of gases in beverages and, specifically on the varied applications and benefits they bring to individual supply chains. Starting from the oil (protection with nitrogen) to the coffee (cryomilling, but also packaging, degassing and decaffeination), from water to the soft drinks (gassing for catering), and beer juices (bottling and gassing, as well as recovery of CO2 from fermentation).”
“In addition to individual applications,” he continued, “we also presented cross-cutting utilities, e.g. , in water purification, room cleaning and refrigerated transport. But before delving into these aspects, the students were shown CO2, nitrogen and argon production processes.”
This was not just a one-on-one lecture, but a time of dialogue and involvement of participants with some on-site experiments related to the properties of liquid nitrogen, as a powerful cooling element, and carbon dioxide, as an extremely high-performance substance, for example, in inerting and beverage carbonation, process to make them sparkling.
Food safety and certified quality
“In the latter case,” Fenili points out, “carbon dioxide is a real ingredient in the carbonated beverage, which is a not insignificant aspect in the field of safety for the end consumer. This explains why SIAD Group is, for all intents and purposes, a food enterprise, complying with the specific requirements defined by the legislature, national and European, going even further, i.e., also equipping itself with voluntary certifications, aiming to go beyond the norm by pursuing the highest standards of product quality and food safety.”
This is also true in the transportation and distribution, whether the product is in liquid or gaseous form. “During the conference, it was deepened the importance of containers, in the area of storage and handling, as well as thelabeling for complete traceability of the production batch,” Fenili concludes, emphasizing SIAD Group’s ongoing commitment to the Promote meetings with an educational and popular slant: “Meeting the professionals of tomorrow represents A valuable opportunity for exchange and comparison”.
