Video Transcript
[Narrator] Our Lives depend on nutrients from birth through our golden years sustainable nutrient-rich foods are vital to our health. Today nearly 10 percent of the world’s population is food insecure. As the population continues to grow and climate change continues to exacerbate weather events, rates of nutrition insecurity will increase.
[Owen McDougal, Director of the Food and Dairy Innovation Center at Boise State University] The United States is uniquely positioned to address Global Food insecurity. The dairy industry produces more milk than it can process into products so there’s significant growth potential.
[Kristi Spence, Sr. VP – Marketing and Communications at Dairy West] Dairy provides a complete nutrient package and if we can harness some of the technology that exists, apply it to real world challenges that we’re seeing in the dairy industry and across the supply chain, what we’re able to do is to accelerate the availability of products and solutions for global nutrient insecurity.
[McDougal] We assembled the teams across disciplines at different universities with a wide range of expertise to generate solutions for the challenges facing the industry.
[Narrator] Dairy NutriSols offers a dairy research and Innovation Hub designed to create Technology Solutions for both farmers and dairy companies to produce sustainable nutrient-rich products to meet a time-sensitive global demand. A critical key to their success is the development of industry partnerships.
[Brian Meyer, Technical Director at Food Physics] We’ve chosen to partner with BSU for a number of reasons. They have great people great knowledge, great capability in terms of facilities, but also they take what is traditionally an academic application and put it into real commercial use to solve real world problems.
[Narrator] Dairy NutriSols is currently working on a number of opportunities across the dairy industry. Pulse electric field and extruder technology both have the potential to produce dairy products with consistent high nutrient density that are also palatable with an extended shelf life making export to every region of the globe a reality. Pulse electric field technology is the application of high voltage electric charge to alter the cell structure of materials this allows researchers to change the properties of milk to enhance products like dairy protein powders.
[Elizabeth Ryan, 3rd year PhD student – Biomolecular Sciences Program at Boise State University] We can create those protein powders more sustainably and we can also provide our consumers with a higher quality protein powder.
[Narrator] Extruder technology uses temperature pressure and Shear settings to create uniform nutrient dense products.
[Mia Van Rheede, 2nd year PhD student – Biomolecular Sciences Program at Boise State University] It’s very versatile it saves on labor costs and space taking all the nutrients and all the protein components of milk putting it into a shelf stable nutrient bar that can be marketed for sports, toddlers, and elder care.
[Narrator] the Dairy NutriSols team is also developing chemometric software for real-time monitoring of protein and milk with infrared spectroscopy. Currently industry technology for quality control is expensive, imprecise, and time and labor intensive.
[Tim Andersen, Professor of Computer Science at Boise State University] They don’t have real-time analysis of the protein content. The quality of the product can be impacted, you can have more waste you have to throw product away because you didn’t process it correctly.
[McDougal] So introducing chemometric software we can improve the efficiency of the process we can reduce cost, we can reduce time, we can also eliminate significant waste.
[Brandon Nelson, Director of Innovation and Technical Services at Daisy Brand] It’s important to us that our product is nutritious and wholesome. Consistent quality, consistent attributes, that all requires the scientific method.
[Van Rheede] If we can collaborate and share information, that is how we’re going to make science that reflects real change.
[Ryan] It’s super important for me to feel like I am making an impact in my everyday work and I’m able to do that with science research.
[McDougal] The students that work on these, they work with industry regularly, and they gain professional development that’s critical for their careers.
[Spence] Student research is really crucial to making sure that we have a pipeline of really important studies being done. But also, a pipeline of skilled and trained workers who can take the dairy industry into the future.