Demand for organic food is on the rise. In the US alone in 2017, the market was valued at $45.20billion. By 2025, it is forecast to be worth $70.4billion. This upsurge is fuelled by many aspects, including the trend towards plant-based diets and healthier living. It is also indicative of another trend: that consumers are willing to pay more to know precisely where their veggies come from. 

TOMRA Food will be present once again at the ProSweets 2020 in Hall 10.1 stand G-018 to showcase its state-of-the-art sweet sorting systems for confectionery.

Nicolai Prytz, sustainability and strategy director at TOMRA, has looked at how businesses, consumers and policymakers can help make the future of food sustainable.

Product recalls are something no business can afford. While customer claims and product recalls are relatively infrequent in the petfood industry; when they do occur, they can be incredibly costly. While it’s impossible to put an exact figure on the financial and reputational impact they can have on a business or brand, it is widely acknowledged that the impact of a recall or claim is simply immense.

As of mid-November TOMRA Food will be changing the name of its global corporate social media accounts from TOMRA Sorting Food to TOMRA Food.

The most frustrating challenges for almond producers lie around detecting the tiniest defects and removing these nuts from production. Many inspection systems simply are not sensitive enough to spot the tiniest pinhole damage, making rework by human inspectors unavoidable.

Fragments of shell becoming embedded in almond flesh is an unavoidable effect of the shelling process. Some types of almonds are more prone than others due to water content of the nut and hardness of shell.  Unfortunately for processors, embedded shell is classified as foreign material.  With confectionary companies demanding less and less foreign material, embedded shell has become one of the most focused on defects to remove.  Many confectionary companies require less than 5 pieces of foreign material per ton.  To put this into perspective, there are approximately 1 Million almonds in one metric ton, so to ask for less than 5 pieces to have embedded shell is an enormous request.

The global potato market is growing. Consumer demand is on the up, with the potato recognized once more as the nutritious, tasty, low-cost diet staple it is. Many factors have created this effect: value-added products, carb-friendly diets and new varieties of potato to name a few, plus promotions, such as Potatoes: More than a bit on the side.

Almond doubles (twins) are just as tasty and nutritious as their single cousins, yet often cause a high quality product to be sold at a lower grade due to the challenges around blanchin or slicing the odd shape. Whilst premium whole nut brands might reject these concave nuts, there are plenty of others waiting to turn them into butter, flour or use them in snack bars.

A simple online search for ‘food waste’ yields thousands of results; from official government reports to news of innovative initiatives spearheaded by global supermarket chains and local restaurants, the drive to reduce food waste across the supply and consumption chain has garnered significant publicity and investment, steadily gathering momentum to become one of the biggest global movements of our time.