Agricultural Research Service Eastern Regional Research Center Research for a Growing World (2005, 11 min. 40 sec.) Narrator Research at the Eastern Regional Research Center, ERRC, is not limited to one area of agriculture. Instead the center finds new food and non-food uses for commodities ranging from milk, meat, poultry, fruits, vegetables, juices and grains to hides, leather, wool, fats, and oils. New knowledge and technology from the research center, located in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania, has helped ensure and will continue to ensure an abundance of high quality agricultural commodities and products at reasonable prices. Since 1940, ERRC scientists have worked to meet increasing needs and to provide a continued improvement in the standard of living of all Americans. John P. Cherry, Director, ERRC You know most people think of agricultural research, they relate to the farm. You know the farm and the farmer and the growing of the crops. They don't have a real appreciation for the fact that what happens after it leaves the farm. It's after the farm gate that our role, our program begins. It leaves the farm and moves to the processor and then to the marketplace and then to you and I as the consumer to enjoy the foods and so that's always the unknown part of what we do here and the importance of the research to make the foods even more nutritional, maintain more quality, better shelf life. Narrator ERRC often uses the research pilot plant concept to emulate commercial processing plants used by private industry. This unique cooperation allows scientists to cooperate with public and private organizations to test the practical applications of their research. It's hard to convince industry to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to retrofit a plant with new technology that hasn't been tested on a large scale or pilot plant level. John P. Cherry, Director, ERRC We work with Hatfield. We actually have a lab in their facility. They are so excited about us being there they cooperate and support our programs and allow us to use their facilities to study and understand why certain pathogens like salmonella will show up. Narrator Through cooperation with companies such as Hatfield Quality Meats, ERRC is able to discover innovative solutions to industry practices by applying research pilot plant concepts in the private sector which is best done in the commercial setting and also meet the needs of consumers. Alan Osser, Vice President of Technical Services We've been working with ARS for about 25 years. Currently we're working on a project where we're placing antimicrobials inside of packaging. Normally antimicrobials are placed in a product so we feel by putting the antimicrobial in the package itself, we'll be able to control any microbial growth more directly and with less antimicrobial at lower cost. If this new project works out antimicrobials would be able to be placed in packages at a very reasonable cost with equipment that's already available that can be bolted onto packaging machines. Narrator ERRC scientists benefit not only from seeing their research put to work in actual industry operations but from the reward of knowing they made a difference. John P. Cherry, Director, ERRC It would be very easy for anyone from a small producer to a very large producer to accept this technology. The fact that it will be so readily available so easily installed should make it's deployment very very rapid. The ultimate benefit will be the consumer will have safer products. Narrator The cooperative research and development agreement, or CRADA, is the primary tool linking government and industry researchers. This program, authorized under the Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986, allows federal laboratories and businesses to form commercial partnerships that help move technologies into the marketplace. John B. Luchansky, Research Leader I don't think any of the studies we do here could be as impacted if they weren't multidisciplinary and also if they didn't enlist a variety of collaborators and so presently we've got several CRADA partners, academia, industry. For example Hatfield Quality Meats, we do a lot with Qualicon DuPont, do a lot with academia, University of Wisconsin several other universities--putting teams together microbiologists, veterinarians, molecular biologists, people with expertise in engineering or food science and bringing that altogether to address the particular problem that we are trying to study. I don't think there is a negative to putting more people power or more brains on a project. Narrator Food safety research at ERRC is intended to provide regulators with valuable information to conduct risk assessments and to provide manufacturers with useful and practical information to enhance the safety and quality of their products. John P. Cherry, Director, ERRC Sometimes we'll work with a partner because they have an expertise that we don't and I think a good example of that is some of the work we've done recently with the Institute for Genomics Research down in Rockville, Maryland. We wanted to do whole genome sequencing of Listeria monocytogenes, a very important food borne pathogen. Narrator Scientists at ERRC also cooperate with their colleagues at other ARS lab locations such as the USDA Richard B. Russell Agricultural Research Center, in Athens, Georgia. In order to reap the benefit of other areas of scientific expertise. John P. Cherry, Director, ERRC With our colleagues down in Athens, we've done several projects where we've recovered for example Listeria monocytogenes or Salmonella from foods or from animals and we've been able to work up the microbiology to detect them and to type them. We had DNA fingerprint technologies then through collaboration with NARMS, the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System, we've been able to send those islets down to Athens, we've been able to do antibiotic susceptibility testing and plug that information in to their database. Narrator Consumers might not ever realize it, they just enjoy the benefits, but by developing tools to detect pathogens and increasing knowledge in this field of research, ERRC scientists are helping to make our food safer. Another ERRC development low fat mozzarella cheese for USDA's national school lunch program provides a good example of research at the center which its scientists are happy to go unnoticed. Students just benefit from the nutritional value of the cheese. The new low fat cheese melts and tastes just like the regular kind that usually tops pizza. In taste trials in public schools throughout the country students couldn't tell the difference between the low fat and the full fat cheese Peggy Tomasula, Research Leader Well one of our projects that we recently completed is the low fat mozzarella cheese project. Not too long ago the Under Secretary at the time was saying that we should lower the fat content of the lunches served in schools. School pizzas could contain up to 50% fat so we've lowered the fat content of the cheese on the pizzas to less then 10% while maintaining the properties of the cheese, the stretch and the taste so that the children would like the modified pizzas. The school lunch program has adopted the process that we've developed at Eastern Regional Research Center to make the low fat mozzarella cheese and so far over 25 billion pounds have been sold at a cost of $40 million. It's good to know that we're directly helping the health of children in schools. Narrator Whether made at home or in a restaurant traditional Hispanic dishes usually don't taste authentic if made with American style cheese. So, ERRC scientists are now helping US cheese makers meet the nation's growing demand for Hispanic cheese and to extent the shelf life and safety of these tasty products. The researchers are scrutinizing the physical, chemical and microbial properties of the cheeses relying not only on laboratory instruments but also on the evaluation of a panel of taste testers. Peggy Tomasula, Research Leader With the growth in the Hispanic population in this country we've recently been investigating Hispanic style cheeses so what we've been doing is investigating the properties of these particular cheeses. Right now there are no standards of identity for these cheeses and significant brand to brand variation exists. So we're looking at various properties such as melting, flavor and trying to correlate them and get numerical scores for their various attributes. Narrator Wyndmoor scientists aren't just interested in food safety, nutrition and quality they also want to develop innovative technologies that lead to new and expanded market opportunity for United States agriculture. They want to maintain the quality of harvested agricultural commodities or otherwise enhance their marketability, develop efficient processing concepts and expand domestic and global market opportunities through the development of value added food and non-food products and processes. One recent success story involved using a common laundry detergent enzyme, a protease, to turn shavings from cattle hide tanning into a high value protein that can be used in a range of products such as adhesives and packaging films. William N. Marmer, Research Leader The tanning industry generates a huge amount of solid waste from making leather. There were some environmental concerns. They wanted to know whether we could do anything with that waste. Well we looked at it and we looked at our past experience, we thought that there might be an interesting biotechnological approach using enzymes to break that waste down. We worked in the laboratory on this, we achieved great results in the lab, we moved it into the tannery to scale it up. What we were able to do is to take that waste and treat it with enzymes, recover that waste, industrial grade gelatin, another protein material called protein hydrolysate and maybe most importantly remove the mineral tannage, the chromium tannage material, and recycle it right back into the tanning process. We were able to invoke the expertise of the cost engineer here and show the industry that not only was it feasible technically but it made economic sense to do it. There's money to be made by recycling this material. Narrator ARS has a successful track record of partnering with commercial firms to transfer the fruits of its labor to American farmers, industries and consumers. Scientific investigations by multidisciplinary research teams at ERRC are sharing techniques, insights, advanced scientific instruments and facilities in order to continue providing ground breaking research into the future.