Technology improving food, visiting professor says

The New Zealand food processing industry and consumers can gain ''win-win'' benefits, through using the right technologies to make food ''safer and healthier'', Marc Hendrickx says.

Prof Hendrickx is a Belgian food scientist who is being hosted by the University of Otago food science department this month as the inaugural Harraways 1867 Visiting Professorship recipient.

His visit comes thanks to a $100,000 gift from one of the country's oldest food processing companies, Harraways and Sons Ltd, of Dunedin, which instituted the professorship to mark its 150th anniversary, last year.

Prof Hendrickx is head of the Laboratory of Food Technology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in Belgium.

He visited the Harraway's Green Island plant yesterday, and said later he was optimistic about the future of new and emerging food processing technologies.

Research findings in the ''very exciting'' new and emerging technologies were also bringing important benefits for more traditional thermal food processing.

High-pressure processing was already bringing positive benefits and pre-processing by using electrical pulses was a promising emerging approach.

Food science had helped produce food for people who ''value all-natural health foods'', which were produced using sustainable methods, and with a ''low environmental impact''.

Prof Hendrickx will give the Harraways Public Lecture at the university on Monday, titled ''Rethinking Food Processing in a Changing World''.