SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this STTR Phase I project is a sustainable fruit and vegetable processing technology utilizing a new, low temperature technique that can extend the shelf life of pre-cut fruits and vegetables by months without using preservatives, chemicals, freezing, or refrigeration. The technology would enable: all-natural, shelf stable fruit and vegetable products that retain maximum nutritional value, texture, and taste. With significant percentages of the total US national energy budget used for food-related energy, and high fresh produce loss in the developed countries due to insufficient refrigeration, achieving shelf life extension without cold storage or preservatives could drastically reduce energy costs, increase efficiency, and expand access to nutrition globally. This STTR Phase I project proposes to develop, validate, and build-upon initial research to evaluate the feasibility and scope of a novel food processing technology. Traditional processing methodologies have fundamental drawbacks. High temperature treatments degrade nutritional quality while altering texture and taste of end-products. Freezing negatively affects the reconstitution properties of fruits and vegetables, and requires high energy consumption throughout the food system to maintain the cold chain. HPP (high pressure processing) has limitations on the enzymes it can inactivate, and chemical alterations from high pressure treatment negatively affects texture and taste. This research proposal will use validation studies to evaluate the feasibility and applicability of the novel processing technique to a variety of fruits and vegetables. Successful experimentation will prove that the application of dense phase gas at low temperatures can overcome the aforementioned drawbacks, achieving enzymatic inactivation, destruction of the spores, improved reconstitution properties, lower energy requirements, and minimal deterioration of taste, texture, and nutritional quality. Such a result would actuate follow-on development work to validate that, at commercial scale, the new process technology improves upon the operational costs of traditional methodologies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this SBIR Phase II project is to improve fruit and vegetable storage and dairy powder production in situations that currently require additives and carrier agents during the high-temperature processing techniques. The creation of novel, high-quality, shelf-stable food products is an important step toward increasing food system sustainability and accessibility. The team seeks to increase shelf-stability, reducing reliance on the expensive and limited cold chain. This technology has potential applications for pharmaceutical drug preservation. Additionally, global water shortages have increased reliance on desalination technologies that are expensive and environmentally taxing. With the potential cost, scalability, and portability benefits of the proposed separation technology, there is further potential for use in water treatment.This SBIR Phase II project seeks to further develop a hybrid separation technology combining supercritical fluids and sonication to instantly separate a solute and solvent at operational temperatures of 15-55 °C, with inputs as low as 1% solids. The technology results in products with particles sizes of <10um to >250um and varying crystallization without hardware changes. By creating a continuous separation effect using velocity (supersonic flow as the kinetic driving force for phase separation instead of heat), the technology overcomes the end-product quality limitations of traditional thermal drying techniques, and has the potential to scale with attractive unit economics,. This method is significantly more energy efficient than existing methodologies. Specifically, the technology can produce pure fruit, vegetable, and dairy powders without preprocessing concentration steps, additives, carrier agents, or thermal treatment. The method may also be used to develop drug formulations for aerosol delivery and/or enhanced bioavailability, streamline sugar manufacturing to create co-energy generation, and potentially offer cost effective compact desalination systems to make drinkable water. The Phase II research seeks to design, construct, and optimize a scalable pilot system through computational fluid dynamics modeling, custom fabrication, and analytical testing to validate the unit economics and end-product attributes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.