Safe food says goodbye to allergens

Danisco protects food and the consumer with a new range of allergen-free antimicrobials and protective cultures.

Food allergy sufferers are dependent on accurate labelling of processed foods if they are to avoid specific allergens in their diets. Now international labelling laws have been introduced to make their lives easier and safer.

Danisco has responded to this new legislation by taking steps to help manufacturers avoid allergens in their products altogether.

Within food protection, the company has determined to eliminate all food allergens and ingredients that may contain allergens from its range of antimicrobials and protective cultures.

“We started this process a few years ago by removing lactose from some of our TEXEL® Meat Cultures,” says Stéphane Constant, Food Protection Business Director.

“We have now totally switched the production of Nisaplin® Natural Antimicrobial to media free of milk, soya, wheat and egg. Nor do we include any of the allergens listed in the new legislation in the production or formulation of these products.

Most TEXEL® Meat Maturation Cultures and HOLDBAC™ Protective Meat Cultures are now produced without allergens.”

Non-dairy natural antimicrobial

The development of entirely non-dairy Nisaplin® Natural Antimicrobial has been achieved by replacing traditional foaming and scooping processes with modern, safer and more consistent micro-filtration and ultra-filtration technology at the Nisaplin® production plant.

In addition to enabling the full replacement of milk with sugar and non-allergenic protein sources, the new extraction process has optimised the plant’s fermentation and extraction capacity and made it generally more environmentally friendly.

“Today, our non-dairy Nisaplin® is Kosher certified. We also aim to get ISO 14000 certification with full health, safety and environment clearance by the spring of this year,” says Business Director Stéphane Constant.

Allergen-free food protection for meat

To develop a complete range of allergen-free starter cultures for meat fermentation and protection purposes, Danisco established a development project targeting the TEXEL® Meat Culture and HOLDBAC™ Protective Culture ranges.

The project team has developed new strain manufacturing, formulation and downstream processes and validated the resulting products in situ. Customers have also been involved in qualifying the final products.

“Our allergen-free TEXEL® Meat Maturation Culture and HOLDBAC™ Meat Protective Culture products are staggered for full implementation by this spring - but currently we have more than 11 strains and 39 products that are fully allergen free.

Other benefits of our newly developed processes are higher yield in terms of cell density and improved nitrate reductase activities,” says Business Director Stéphane Constant.

The road ahead

Work continues to optimise Danisco’s allergen-free food protection solutions and allow manufacturers to concentrate on what they are best at: the production of consistently appealing food and beverage products.

As every manufacturer knows, product recalls due to incorrect labelling are an expensive burden. Danisco is lightening the load.