Who should attend?
Food businesses that want to create appealing products that as well as being profitable also consider health and environmental impact.
Insight & Innovation
Make your Menu Healthy and More Appealing through Recipe Development
Workshop Structure
The workshop will focus on three key parts:
• Intro to some key nutrients and why they are good for us/our microbiome (dietary fibre, vitamins, minerals)
• Examples on how to increase/substitute key nutrients/ingredients
o Fibre intake through pulses, wholegrain, blending of whole vegetables including skin; use of pulses or novel ingredients (tempeh, seitan, etc) and local ingredients (brassicas) options instead of meat or other veg = more sustainable and cost-efficient
o How to reduce added sugar using natural sugars (dried fruit) or prebiotics inulin and other FOS
o Reducing salt, increasing herbs.
• Analysis tools to visualise/measure changes of nutritional profile. This can allow you to analyse a recipe and see how the nutritional composition improves as you make changes
• Time for Q&A from the audience
Why should I attend?
This workshop will help you to understand how formulation changes can improve your product and menu offering.
What will I takeaway?
Simple ideas on how to make products more nutritious/gut friendly and how nutrient analysis tools could be used to quantify these changes.
Luciana Torquati, University of Exeter
Luciana is a Senior Lecturer in Nutrition and registered nutritionist with the Association for Nutrition (UK), whose research interests include healthy diet and the gut microbiome. Her research is multi-disciplinary working with colleagues in Natural Sciences, Bioscience, Sport Science, and Psychology. Her overarching theme is how modifying diet and gut microbiome can promote health and prevent chronic disease; either by direct changes in diet composition or diet behaviour (perceptions, nutrition education, cooking skills, self-efficacy).
Luciana is currently researching inulin (fermentable fibre) supplementation on different gut microbiome-mediated outcomes. These include improved health and performance in athletes, and reduced cardiovascular disease and inflammation to sustain healthy ageing. Her work has also included projects with industry, including fermented foods characterisation (Benetts Kombucha, Exeter) and phytochemical bioavailability in broccoli (QUEX PhD studentship and PepsiCo).
Paul Banks, Fresha Catering
Living within Devon, Paul has an energetic Entrepreneurial passion for breathing life into business enterprises with an ability to forge strong links with the local community whilst driving ethical business plans which deliver sustainable and profitable growth. Paul is driven by having a sense of purpose in what he does, with integrity and a keen sense of humour.
Paul’s main role is the Managing Director of Fresha Catering. With his enthusiasm for making things happen has built a multi million pound turnover business with a portfolio of services including: café’s contract catering to an increasing number of schools, commercial and Government contracts and outside catering that includes retail food vans, event and conference catering.
During recent years, Paul has been in the middle of questions and discussions around meals in schools, the National Food Strategy, obesity and nutrition, the rising price of food and the cost of living, local food chains and carbon footprints.
On a frequent basis Paul is asking questions of what we eat, why, and where it comes from. With Fresha now feeding 6,000 school children each school day throughout Devon, such questions are even more important, especially as over a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions result from food and agriculture.
Paul hopes that he and his team are making small and positive changes to all of this.