OMB_Meeting_Book-11-2016

AOAC OMB Teleconference Materials

165

Appraisal and evaluation: Dr. Michael Blumenthal's work has spanned an extremely wide array of contributions to, and studies of, the chemical sciences, and in particular as they apply to the products of agriculture and their manufacture into food products. He has been a member and leader of research teams creating key processes fundamental to food processing today. At Libra Technical Center, his work has directly affected more than 500 companies for which he and his colleagues have consulted and performed laboratory research and analyses. More than 400 organizations have used the new rapid testing technology to improve quality control and process economics. In the last 30+ years, Dr. Blumenthal has directed operations resulting in more than 500 industrial consulting reports available on-line within Libra, in addition to his publications and private industry reports, and he has overseen the preparation of more than 1000 on-line analytical reports for a global customer base. Thus he has founded an enterprise in which independent science can be conducted confidentially and with an enormous database of recorded knowledge and experience behind it, as well as an enterprise that creates new technologies and new products for application of chemical principles to better foods, fats, and oils. Dr. Blumenthal's experience and ability to understand and translate extremely complex chemical systems into elegant, reliable, simple tools is a very rare combination. His new Paradigm of Frying is not only a creative and powerful achievement in a specific area of food chemistry, but also serves as a model for an approach to solving problems in the complex world of the total chemical events which occur in a living system from agriculture which is brought into an engineering / manufacturing environment. He has shown the way for an extremely useful strategy for converting chemical principles to the economics of food production. The power to predict is one of the most compelling aspects of Dr. Blumenthal's contributions. Both the Frying Paradigm and the Solventless Chemistry technology are a direct outgrowth of the pathway that began with Dr. Blumenthal's studies on saliva, as part of a cystic fibrosis project. This study enabled an understanding of physiology and the limitations of sensory work. In his Master's Degree research on onion flavor chemistry, Dr. Blumenthal was able to understand what to look at when doing mathematical pattern recognition. In his Ph.D. research, he was able to achieve an unparalleled degree of correlation of instrument measurement with the human sensory experience: by the use of computerized pattern recognition methods, he was able to achieve nearly perfect prediction of the sensory evaluation by using only 2 peaks from a complex flavor chromatogram. The technique he developed is now used by the most advanced flavor houses in the creation of natural-tasting and -smelling analogs made from synthetic materials. The New Paradigm of Deep-Fat Frying has taken thousands of chemical events, in all the numerous combinations and permutations of oils, foods, frying systems, environments, personnel, etc., and reduced the measurements needed to predict food quality, shelf-life, oil usage, and so on, to only 3 tests, one of which (Total Polar Materials) has regulatory applications in Europe, where the oil must be discarded before it reaches the statutory limit, and yet for which the corresponding laboratory procedure is so prohibitive in its cost, time, and expertise required, that only after-the-fact compliance can be established. Through Libra's Solventless Chemistry technology, these 3 tests can be performed by anyone, anywhere, anytime, to achieve true process and quality control. They allow the prediction of food quality, shelf-life of packaged foods, and process economics, all from the oil's condition. They put safe, simple and accurate measurement systems in the hands of those who must make decisions before things go wrong. The technology can be extended to an enormous array of applications and solves many of the problems that prevent easy and frequent chemical measurements and

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11/09/2016