Researchers pull the fat from the processing fire

Food scientists at Moorepark Technology Ltd near Fermoy, Co Cork, have turned waste bacon fat into a natural food ingredient that has commercial potential around the world. The process uses familiar food processing technology to create a new product that can be used in a range of applications.

"A client company came to us and said they had a by-product that they wanted to find some way to use," explained Mr Denis Neville, a research officer and ingredient technologist at Moorepark. Teagasc's Moorepark campus includes the Dairy Research Centre, the animal husbandry unit and Moorepark Technology Ltd (MTL), a pilot plant for the development of food products.

The company, Dew Valley Foods Ltd of Holycross, Thurles, is a specialist supplier of cooked bacon to other food producers in Britain and Ireland. It cooks them using microwaves and a byproduct is large amounts of bacon fat, which it sold off at very low cost just to get rid of it.

The company, which was established in 1988 and employs 95 people, believed however that the fat might have potential as a flavouring ingredient. The bacon is naturally smoked before processing and the fat retained this smoky bacon flavour, Mr Neville said.

Moorepark had been working for some time on new processing methods for fats using a technique known as microencapsulation. Dr Kieran Keogh and Dr Brendan O'Kennedy, he said, had developed a process to surround minute fat and oil particles in a dry powder coating, producing particles only one-40th of a millimetre across. "It seemed to me that the microencaspulation technology seemed like an appropriate technology to use for this byproduct," Mr Neville said. The advantage of this approach, he said, was that it used familiar equipment in widespread use in the dairy industry. "The whole microencapsulation process is using established dairy processes to produce specialised powders. The equipment is already available, it is just being able to manipulate the processes to suit the product."

Equipment in MTL's pilot plant was used to develop the new bacon fat flavouring product, he said. The first problem was finding an efficient way to purify the byproduct, known as a "cook-out" in the food industry. Cream separator units were modified so that the cook-out which was 70 per cent fat and 30 per cent water, could be separated without losing too much of the smoky bacon flavour.

The coating material is a milk protein which is derived from whole milk and then mixed with a milk sugar, lactose. The coating and the fat were combined and then repeatedly homogenised under high pressure, a process which breaks the relatively large liquid fat globules into smaller droplets which in turn allows the coating material to surround the particles.

This mix is then spray dried to produce a dry powder. The challenge, Mr Neville said, was to optimise the fat separation and homogenising techniques to produce a powder that would allow good flavour release during reconstitution.

The initial Dew Valley Foods approach came in July 1997 and the various processes were developed and refined during 1998. Food application trials and market evaluation also got under way to establish that the smoky bacon flavour was retained through the production process.

Confirmation of this came when the product was entered in the research award category at the Food Ingredients Europe Exhibition last November in Frankfurt, Germany. The natural bacon fat-flavoured ingredient, he said, was placed in the top three.

The new flavouring is now being commercialised, according to Mr Pat Smith, general manager, Dew Valley Foods Ltd. "We are near agreement with a US company who are in the ingredients market and they will market this worldwide," he said. The company is currently involved in a £10 million (#12.7 million) expansion that will double capacity he said.

The initial production target is about 10 tonnes of the powdered flavouring per week, Mr Neville said, using the pilot plant at Moorepark. This output should be achieved within six months, but if the product takes off production will have to move, probably to a specialist spray drying contractor where larger volumes can be produced.