Less resource-intensive new product/process development, faster time-to-market performance, and high-quality innovation are the eventual goals in building and compiling these digital resources for the food industry. These tools will provide more universal access to obtaining “what-if” scenarios in product/process design, allowing more front-end work that will become cheaper, faster, and better for a range of industry sizes. In education, some of these tools will enable discovery mode and deeper insight into food material science, and more complex and multidisciplinary thinking in product/process interactions in quality development.
Three groups of resources available are:
- A food properties knowledge base that provides access to the widest possible range of food properties to anyone, anytime, anywhere;
- A process simulation apps collection to guide food processors and manufacturers toward the most effective process improvement approaches
- An annotated visualization library representing the most complex food processes, providing mechanistic insight and thus pathways to optimizing product/process development.
This is being built as a community resource. They will all be crowdsourced. We hope to be transformative and capacity building.