Our Strategic Research Focus

Improvement and Maintenance of Peanuts, Peanut Products and Related Peanut Product Flavor, Shelf Life, Functional Characteristics

• Improve peanut flavor, flavor consistency and nutritional composition through integration of novel peanut genetic/genomic resources.
• Identify commercially-viable bioactive compounds from raw/roasted peanuts and characterize their functional food attributes.
• Enable the commercial use of whole high-oleic peanuts and/or by-products as a livestock (poultry, swine, and aquaculture) feed ingredient.

 

Improved Vegetable Processing Methods to Reduce Environmental Impact, Enhance Product Quality and Reduce Food Waste

• Development of controlled, low-salt vegetable fermentations free of added preservatives using biofunctional lactic acid bacteria starter cultures to improve commercial product quality and reduce spoilage and food waste.
• Identify beneficial chemical constituents of vegetables that facilitate the development of novel, clean-label, health-promoting fermented and acidified products that retain consumer-preferred appearance, textures, and flavor during processing, storage and distribution.
• Determine the physical and chemical characteristics of sweetpotato genotypes to optimize commercial food processing methods and enable commercially viable, novel, value-added products that meet consumer preferences.

 

Intervention Strategies for Controlling Human Pathogens Associated with Fermented and Acidified Vegetables

• Determining the safety of low and alternative salt fermentations, produced nationally and internationally
• Develop predictive models for 5-log reduction times for pathogenic Escherichia coli in fermented and acidified vegetable products
• Enhance buffer capacity models for predicting pH changes in acidified foods with low acid ingredients.