“Leverage existing knowledge”

At IFFI’s next event ‘New Food Ingredients’, we will discuss ways to drive innovation from a marketing and culinary perspective. Speakers from Global Food Science, Cargill, and Griffiths are invited to talk about their experiences.

Today we asked one of the speakers, Dimitris Lykomitros, Technology Intelligence Scout at Cargill, to give us a taste of what he will be sharing on the 30th of March.

Aside from his role at Cargill, Dimitris is the European branch’s chair and co-founder of the Research Chefs Association (RCA). In his lecture, he will use the actions and aims of this association to illustrate the benefits of combining science and culinary arts. Also called: culinology. With the help of specific case studies, from Cargill amongst others, he will show how culinology manifests in the industry, advances the food industry and improves quality and speed-to-market.

Food production is equal parts culinary technique and inspiration and food science. Culinology as a principle aims at combining the two, with the aim of accelerating and improving product development . The lecture will focus on  three main ways in which culinology manifests itself and which are useful in our day and time. These are upcycling, the use of novel ingredients and in reformulation. To gain inspiration increase their chances for success when reformulating a recipe whilst keeping the taste, the scientist can knock on the chef’s door and ask them for their culinary advice.

For example, in the context of novel ingredients, Cargill used chefs to finetune and demonstrate the applications of the vegan chocolate “ExtraVeganZa”.

It eases the step and the process necessary to upcycle ingredients like “ugly produce” into crisps for instance, or to develop vegetarian burger alternatives with mushrooms.

During the lecture, Dimitris will go into detail about three specific examples of how science and the culinary arts unified to create an innovative product.

Tickets are available until the 30th of March.

Hope to see you there!

Dimitris Lykomitros